The Fleeing Evangelist (For the Feast of Saint Mark)

If he truly was the young man
who fled naked when they seized him
by his linen garment while following the one
captured in the garden,
do we then, perhaps, see in this
a truth that fits the shy evangelist well?
Does it not match well one whose face
evades us, who flees when we hold him?
Churches in Egypt stand in his stead,
traditions flow from him like the train of his cloak,
yet in the certainty of history he drops them,
sheds them and flees,
leaving us looking instead, through the crystal clarity
of his words at the one who stood in the wilderness,
who cleared the temple and drove out the spirits,
who declared Himself the promised one
and rose again to prove it. Look at him!
If this Mark truly was the one who let down Paul
yet raised up churches where great libraries fell
and died when his enemies finally caught him,
it seems fitting that we do not know
for sure about him, dressed only in linen,
and fleeing from us lest we hold onto him
and hold not the Word who he stood to proclaim.

First World Problems: Ten Miniatures for Anzac Day

I.
Cobblestones shine
from day-long downpour;
public holiday takes dreamy footsteps
through mid-week tension.
II.
The sun too shy to rise this morning,
yet rises late as rain
from the day slowly subsides.
At its going and rising, remember…
III.
Too early and cold this morning;
the Dawn Service dropped into
my conscience and sat there.
I pulled up my blanket and slept.
IV.
And the knowledge lingers:
peace bought with blood hangs
over the day, a red-stained cloud
to the holiday quiet.
V.
Cardigan-clad, cold
in unheated home,
rain outside, cleaning the streets
and dampening insides.
VI.
The knowledge of death
beneath, above, this quiet looms:
As darkness deepens,
Lord with me abide.
VII.
Battles fought remembered now,
though reasons for them elude us,
and the peace they brought us
sits lazily among us.
VIII.
Remember now the fallen, not
to glory in streets filled with blood,
or homes destroyed, but to know
of times of war not like this peace.
IX.
And remember, too, the blood
which fell from heaven.
Remember too the wars we wage
daily with our torpid souls.
VIII.
Forgive us, Lord, who sit
inside and cower
from a cold we do not dare
to face or feel.

The Swelling Year

Pregnant with its own hopeful future,
Bursting with change and the newness of experience
Amidst each turn’s cycling familiarity,
The year stands:
A heaving monument to grace
Recognised at each twist and transition,
Offerings of comfort opening from
The baton-changes of seasons
Known all too well,
The greetings of those flowers
We met the last year, the soft rain of dead leaves
Drooping that we may mourn,
Dissolving in soil that new life
May burst forth – a symbol so full
Yet incomplete, just a glimmer
Of what wheat kernels and spring-buds
Can only guess at. Why we find each year
The same twists and turns, the same
Death and repeating birth cycles, we
Can but drop to our knees and ask.
Nevertheless –
In the familiar strains of a Father
Who comforts with the old and the new alike,
Who holds the future and the present
In the same firm grasp as the past,
He has taught us to keep watch,
To observe and to hope.
In this is His gift:
That the swelling expectancy of each
Pregnant year might grow too in us
And be our inward vigil as we,
With the leaf-buds and our fragile new souls,
Await our fullest and final Spring…

The Last Sermon (For Archbishop Oscar Romero)

The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, died performing Mass on March 24, 1980, the day after preaching a provocative final sermon (text available here) exposing the state violence in El Salvador at the time. He is remembered in the Anglican Church calendar today and so is the subject of today’s poem.

The Last Sermon
The day before he died he stood
Before the soldiers, pled with them
As men, as Christians, to put down
Their weapons, to ignore all who
Commanded them to kill when God
Had set a higher, firmer law.
He took his sword and sharpened it
Against the whetstone of their pain.
The Word he wielded cut straight through
The lies, hypocrisy and claims
Of ignorance, attempts to hide
Behind complacent ritual.
And with the violence of love,
He took his sword and pierced the shame
Of their complicity and cried
The cry of the kingdom’s deep pain,
A father’s cry, a nation’s cry
Of longing to be whole again.
And down he went; the servant fell,
The violence of his love matched with
The violent backlash of mad hate,
Of systems which conspired with Hell
To hide the Bride of Christ within
A vacuum and a prison cell.

St. George and the Sifting (For the Feast of St George, Martyr)

Who does not think of St. George as a quasi-impossible personage slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess? And by all means let us so picture him, only turning the wild legend into a parable of truth…Fabrications, blunders, even lies, frequently contain some grain of truth: and though life at the longest cannot be long enough for us to sift all, one occasionally may repay the sifting.
(Christina Rossetti, on the Feast of St. George, in Time Flies: A Reading Diary)
And did he really slay the dragon,
Clad, as Raphael would have him,
In blackest metal, cape a-flying,
Crested helm with halo circling,
Damsel in the waiting, praying
Patiently, the dragon cowering
Beneath the horse’s lifted hoof?
Does there lie, in this, the truth?
Or did he rise, as icons have him,
O’er the flames that licked around him,
Skewering the dragon’s throat,
Horse and dragon both afloat
Above a raging sea of ground,
Damsel tying dragon down
With a rope around his neck,
An angel on the horse’s back?
Or did Diocletian rise
Upon his own proud horse and ride
Against the saints and claim with his
Emperor’s spear the lives of those
Who knelt in treason down before
Another, higher rival Lord?
And did George stand faithful through
The blazing fire that grew and grew?
And did the dragon emperor cower
When Saint George denied his power?
Did the bride of Christ stand tall
From her frightened castle wall,
Proud and confident to see
That saint who would not lie or flee,
Purified by the flames from the dragon,
Sifted, found pure from the sifting?

Ontology (For Anselm of Canterbury, d. 21 April 1109)

If our minds,
Flawed and finite as they are,
Can find thought-bulbs and clues of You
Who must, we know, be greater than
The total sum of all our best,
Our dimmest thoughts,
Our smallest glimpse
Of You must shine,
Faintly, weakly, unto You
In all Your fullness, all
Your being, all that our minds
Can only skim in shallow pools,
If our heads can weakly find
The thought, the chance,
That You might Be,
Then all our hearts can softly say
That You must Be who can exist
Within the minds of ones like me.

Second Sunday of Easter: Firstborn

The dust –
(You remember
the dust, how it gathered
your bones and your flesh,
baked deep in its womb)
The dust cannot hold him;
he shapes it
and makes it
anew: it soaks up
his blood, bursts out fresh
in new blossoms
and fields bright in green…
The tree –
(You remember
two trees in the garden,
one full of life,
the other of death)
The tree where he hung,
cursed and dead, hanging,
the maker of trees unmade,
(so it seemed),
That tree then was not
the end to the story,
his body the gate
to that first tree of life…
The grave –
(You all know
the grave that is looming
before us, behind us,
within us; it waits…)
The grave where he lay
could not hope to keep him,
the master of dust,
the sculptor of trees,
the conqueror of graves,
Watch as he leaves,
pushes aside the stone with his fists,
breaks earth and remakes it,
the author of life,
firstborn from the dead…

The Feast

 And dreaming I saw that truth was a feast
Laid out in the desert of starved reason and mind,
Where wanderers weary could lay down to rest
And fill up their souls on all they could find,
 
An oasis where lay the richest of meals
Where all that was mystery or sadness or pain
Would be swept up in all the joy here revealed,
All eyes freed from tears, all hearts from all stains,
 
Fresh clothes laid out to be worn by the guests
Whose years of sore travel left them soiled head to toe
And soft cloths for their brows, cushions for rest,
And the food there laid out! And the new wine that flowed
 
From the aches in the ground and the dryness of land
That knew all along it was made for a sea!
Such joy on the table, such food in our hands,
Was the feast laid in honour of truth’s victory,
 
The prize for the faithful who saw in this desert
A truth far below and high above all our doubt,
A truth that transcended our grief and our pain,
Transfigured it too, turned screams into shouts
 
Of joy and of hope once deferred, now fulfilled.
And at the head of the table sat the lamb that was slain,
The author of life, the king whom we killed,
Now risen, now glorious, the redeemer of pain.

God of the Quake and the Calm

Today commemmorates the death, in 1878, of Bishop George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand. He was, from what I have read, a wise and godly man who did his best to build up a healthy church in New Zealand, and resisted the land-grabbing and violence that pervaded British colonisation at the time. The following poem is based partially on a sermon he preached after an earthquake in Wellington in 1848.

God of the Quake and the Calm
(For George Augustus Selwyn)
God is known in the rustling of the trees in the cool of the day, or in the wind that breaketh the cedars of Libanus: at his will he reveals himself in the still small voice, or in the raging wind, in the earthquake or in the fire.
– Bishop Selwyn, St John’s College, 1849
You knew of the tides, the times
When it was safest to mount the waters in your boat,
And you studied the times of men and of wars,
Observed the uprisings, noted the stirrings
Of anger and resentment, gave praises
In the calm and saw always in the gentleness
Of the waves that you travelled the hand
Of the one who could shake them up in an instant.
When mountains shook, you were unperturbed,
Stood in your pulpit and called all to heed
The warnings that rumbled in each quiver of ground
And each belch of earth’s fires. You saw in both order
And flux in the seasons the wisdom and power
Of the hand that flung stars into the farthest of skies,
Who said to the waves, “Here are your limits, go no further,”
And yet shook the heavens when the time called for it.
You gave warning to those lost in sleep and did not
Slumber yourself while nations heaved up,
And as bodies collected in dead, broken soil,
Your hands turned to bury, your tongue to make peace,
Joined hands with the weary who still could rejoice,
Though the heavens were black, that they saw,
In the storm, that spot of blue sky, and joined
In the hope of the soon-passing storm?

Easter Tuesday: The Stone

The stone, which once sat,
In the dingiest corner,
The home for all refuse,
All dust and all junk,
The stone, once rejected
By builders who saw it
As useless, untidy,
Awkward and poor,
That stone and its brothers –
That ramshackle quarry
Of pebbles and off-cuts,
The debris of ruins –
Now stand as a house,
A glorious palace,
Stadia by stadia
In height and in width.
Those stones, they now sparkle
And glimmer in light
Such as none of those builders
And labourers ever saw,
And firm in foundation,
Its worth all displayed,
Surrounded by rubble
Now glorious and great,
The stone once rejected
(The stone on which builders
Tripped and cut toes)
Now stands in the corner,
The prince of the stones.