Growing up inside poetry

Summary version by Philip Harvey things said in his reading to the Oblates and Associates on Saturday the 24^th of May 2014.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

The life of poetry is often arriving at such places, though T.S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’ is talking of our own lives. It is right to reflect on this poem in the context of the Community of the Holy Name, because Little Gidding was an English religious community itself, operating according to a simple rule, between those two disasters for such spiritual possibility, the dissolution of the monasteries (1536) and the Civil War (1642). Eliot writes that “history is a pattern of timeless moments,” something he found necessary to say in the context of the poem’s composition during the Blitz. Little Gidding was a place of retreat and restoration: “History is now and England.” I quote the poem here also because it was the kind of thing my father read in his study when I was young. We would hear such lines in sermons on Sunday, though it was only later that I would learn the truth of ‘History is now and Australia.’

Eliot was not the poetry I had read to me at that age. There was Norman Lindsay, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, A. A. Milne. Everything was thoroughly Anglo-Australian, one might say. 

The King asked

The Queen, and

The Queen asked

The Dairymaid:
”Could we have some butter for

The Royal slice of bread?”

Everyone in that poem was a capital person, even the Alderney cow. Meanwhile, there was another kind of poetry I heard every week not in the bedroom, but next door in the church. It is extraordinary to consider now: “O come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” Every Sunday we prayed and sang words like Psalm 95. This was worship, it was also an education in poetry and how it works in public. The rhythms, vocabulary and meaning became part of my permanent experience, a very concrete way of seeing the world. The Bible itself is a treasure house of poetry, the Psalms in particular serving as models for poets as well guides for how each of us prays.

We each have favourite poems and memory of lines or whole poems, works of value we carry around with us. Not everyone though needs to start writing poetry themselves. This compulsion started up in me quite early, inspired by such people as Dylan Thomas and a poem like ‘Fern Hill’:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green…

I memorised such lines. It was the way he captured the mood in his amazing choice of words, but also in the timing. He got you to feel what he was talking about, which is one of the gifts of poetry, of any kind. University expanded awareness of the intricate and vast array of English poetry. Literature was a logical subject for me and I was blessed with many great teachers, including poets like Vincent Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and Peter Steele. They affirmed this way of talking and listening and thinking as essential for living. All of experience could potentially be spoken of and recognised. Poetry is a form of shared experience.

Literature offers narrow scope for work prospects, so after mucking around for a couple of years (nowadays they call it a gap year) I decided that as I spent much creative time in libraries, I may as well work there too. This is why you will find me on Mondays at the CHN Library, where I have been since taking over from the good stewardship of Leigh Oliver. My other four days are spent running another library of spirituality, the Carmelite Library in Middle Park.  This still gives me plenty of time to work on poetry and other writing projects. I am fortunate too to have the job of Poetry Editor at Eureka Street, the Jesuit online journal which many readers will be familiar with, a job that keeps me in touch and in tune with other poets, as well as testing my listening ear.

There is a common wealth of good poetry written by Australians. It was a treat, for example, to hear Gwen Harwood read aloud a poem like ‘Night Thoughts’:

‘Hell is for those who doubt that hell exists.’

One of the elohim, with whom I fight

from 4 a.m. to cockcrow, told me this.

He hit me in the thigh for emphasis.

Is it a dream? If so, the dream persists.

These are words that will not ignore the personal challenges of existence. We read them aloud, but we may listen to them at length in our own solitude. The meaning grows with re-reading.

While we enjoy hearing words read aloud, say Eliot when he talks about cats:

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw –

For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.

He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:

For when they reach the scene of crime – Macavity’s not there! 

We know from experience that the majority of our reading is a private matter. We wish to take time over the multiple meanings and in-depth meanings of good writing. There needs to be time for reflection, questioning, understanding. Public reading is valuable, it instructs and entertains, but in poetry as with other reading, we gain by working over time, our own good time, on what someone is telling us with their words. This is certainly true for me. While first impressions can sometimes be accurate, it is familiarity with the person and what they say that tells me if I feel at home with them, or not. 

So I can feel equally at home reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Auden or, when time comes around, reading someone like Christina Rossetti to a child:

What is pink? a rose is pink

By a fountain’s brink.

What is red? a poppy’s red

In its barley bed.

What is blue? the sky is blue

Where the clouds float thro’.

What is white? a swan is white

Sailing in the light.

What is yellow? pears are yellow,

Rich and ripe and mellow.

What is green? the grass is green,

With small flowers between.

What is violet? clouds are violet

In the summer twilight.

What is orange? Why, an orange,

Just an orange!

Trinity Sunday and Celtic Christianity

Address given by Carol O'Connor on Trinity Sunday at St Peter’s Church, Fawkner, Sunday the 15th of June, 2014

Jesus says, “I am with you until the end of the age.”   These are the last words in the Gospel of Matthew.  Jesus, commissions his disciples to go out into the world and baptise people in the name of the father, son and holy spirit.  He bids them to teach people to obey everything that he has taught them. And assures them that he is always with them, and by implication all who come after them in his name.

The Trinity is central to our identity as Christians, as Anglicans, and this morning I want to look at what I think are 2 important traits of the Trinity. At the heart of the Trinity is mystery, a mystery founded on Love.  Secondly the Trinity is relational, it highlights to us right ways of being with ourselves, with God, with one another, and within creation.  And this right relationship is what we are called to share with others.  We are called to make community, to build unity in the sharing of our diverse gifts.

And I want to explore these 2 traits of the Trinity by focusing on an historical period and culture different from our own. It is the culture of the very early Celtic Christians, primarily in Ireland Scotland from the late 3rd century CE until around the 10th-11th centuries.

The coming of Christianity to Ireland is generally credited to St Patrick who, as a boy was kidnapped and taken to Ireland in the 4th century.  Later, after escaping and travelling on the continent, he went back to Ireland bringing a Christianising influence to the many clans of Celts. I haven’t the time here to explain the origins of the Celtic Culture, or how this fusion of two cultures - the Celts and the Christians - happened, including how great monastic houses came to be built and illuminated manuscripts produced, or the gradual emergence of the early Irish saints. However, I do want to emphasise that  on the whole, the two cultures blended well together. Also, by bringing with them a written form of language, and by being able to build and live in their monastic houses alongside the Celts, Christians enabled the Celts to see themselves with new eyes, just as Christians themselves began to understand new aspects of their own identity. 

MYSTERY

In Tokens of Trust Rowan Williams reminds us that we are never going to understand the all there is to be known about God and God’s workings, because we don’t God’s perspective on it all.  God has made a universe some of which we get a grasp of, some of the time, some of which we don’t, ever.  Mystery is very much part of the human experience. However, what we have is faith that this mystery is one born out of love. 

The Irish Celts were attuned to mystery.  God being 3 persons in one was a concept they could readily take on board. That the Godhead could inspire adoration and contemplation was something they could relate to.  At the top of their own clan or tuath was a King who was benevolent, working in their interests and all to ready to shield and protect them.  The pre Christian Irish also very much had a sense that the veil between this world and the next as being very thin. A King of creation being in operation behind the veil was a mystery they could also accept. Their old God of the green, leafy wood becomes recreated, given new life, in the Christian God of Love.  The Celts had a very strong affinity with and affirmation of the natural world.  Each green leaf, every creature, big and small, was already recognised as fused with God’s life.  And so the breath of the holy spirit, God’s ruach, could bind us and all creation together to offer fruits of wisdom and discernment.  Jesus they could embrace as God’s Son, who like a brother could teach about Love and forgiveness.  The Celts also had a strong regard for the feminine, so Goddesses, such as Bride, goddess of poetry and fire and the hearth, translate across to becoming St Bridget, Mary’s midwife at the birth of Jesus. St Bridget is like a close sister  intimate presence was always with the Celtic Christians. She was with them as they performed ordinary domestic chores:

Come Mary and milk my cow 

Come Bride and encompass her,

Come Columba the benign,

And twine thine arm around my cow.

The Divine as Triune, or 3 persons in one, was also readily accepted because this number held magic for them.   It perfectly suited their love of the poetic form, called the Triad. The Celts were primarily an oral culture.  They found that remembering life’s lessons was best done in 3s. So, for example, Three keys that unlock thoughts: drunkenness, trustfulness, love. Three coffers whose depth is not known: the coffers of a chieftain, of the Church, of a privileged poet.  Three things that ruin wisdom: ignorance, inaccurate knowledge, forgetfulness.

And so, in a nutshell, the early Celtic Christians could move with ease between the idea of a God who was transcendent, that which we pour our hearts out to in adoration; a spirit who was immanent - as breath working for good in the world, inspiring contemplation, stretching our intellect, and; as Jesus, intimate and close, more-so, than any human being we can ever be with.  This Trinity was a mystery they could embrace.

RELATIONAL

 James Alison, catholic priest and theologian who recently was out in Melbourne maintained that we too readily separate the Trinity out into 3 areas of consciousness. In making this split we fail to understand the relational nature of the Father/Mother, Spirit and Son.  Like a piano trio, all three instruments are needed to make the music; without one, the cello or the flute or the piano, the music would distort and loose depth. They work relationally, not as 3 areas of separate consciousness. And, not only is the Trinity relational in terms of its own unity, but also it calls each one of us into a personal, living relationship within its own music. 

relational - between person and creation

In having a great affinity with nature, the early Celtic Christians experienced this relationship in a personal and very present way.  Also central to this relationship was the figure of Jesus. Jesus is the one who enables them to experience the spirit in creation, and opens the door to the Godhead.

There is a long poem commonly known as Marbhan’s hut. Here, Marbhan who was once a Prince, explains to his brother, the king of Connaught in the 7th century, why he has chosen to lead the life of a Christian hermit.  We read in the poem a person who is very much at home in the natural world, in the ordinariness of life and who finds a deep friendship with Jesus who is the true benefactor of all that is good:

I have a hut in the wood

none knows it but my Lord;

an ash tree this side, a hazel beyond,

a great tree on a mound enfolds it

………

Around it lie tame swine,

goats, boars,

wild swine, grazing deer,

a badger’s brood.

……..

A beautiful pine makes music to me

that is not hired;

though I sing to Christ I fare no worse

than you do.

Though you delight in your own pleasures

greater than all wealth,

for my part I am thankful for what is given me

from my dear Christ.

Without an hour of quarrel, without the noise of strife

which disturbs you,

grateful to the Prince who gives every good

to me in my hut.

For Marbhan, life in the present moment, and in the ordinary, is to be delighted in. Not as something that ends in itself but is constantly orienting itself in right relationship with Jesus, ‘grateful to the Prince, who gives every good / to me in my hut.’ Celtic Christians knew instinctively something which Rowan Williams explains, that is, Jesus makes humanly visible God’s presence in the world. Jesus is he who ‘is supremely the one who makes God credible, trustworthy.’ (TT p 65).  For the early Celtic Christians the presence of Christ is familiar, intimate, companionable. In his company their world makes sense.

                relational - between person and person

One anonymous Celtic Christian hermit has written this epigram:

King of stars

            Dark or bright my house may be,

But I close my door on none

            Lest Christ close his door on me

It was an important call to the early Celtic Christians to keep their doors open in hospitality. They tell us, that just as Jesus keeps his door open for us, we need to keep our door open for others.  We have a responsibility to look after one another. We are called to act kindly with each other, stranger and friend. Whoever knocks at our door.

relational - between person  and Trinity

One of the most famous Celtic Christian poems, or hymns known today, is St Patrick’s Breastplate. a lovely aspect of this hymn is its vivid imagery of nature.  (the flashing of the lightning free…) It is also made very clear that we as Christians, move inside God’s story. The words ring like the creed in its affirmation of the essential Christian story and beliefs. We move in a world of relationships centred on the Trinity. Like the intricate weaving of the Celtic knot, there is no beginning, no end. Only us in creation with Jesus and on the inside.

Everything in the hymn is premised in the opening verse which is repeated at the end: I bind unto my self today /The strong name of the Trinity /By invocation of the same / The Three in one, and One in Three.  The created order of the universe, from the beginning of the ages to its end, exists because of the holy reality of the Trinity. In other words, the world has been in relationship with its maker before us, and will be again after us. For St Patrick, this knowledge is an enlightenment that gives him both humility and strength. It enables him to accomplish in the world what he feels called to do. He too takes up his commission to go out in the name of the Trinity and take his place in the narrative of God’s creation. His image for this understanding is of a lorica or a breastplate.  He puts it on to give him courage and protection.  The alternate title for this poem is the Deer’s Cry, which refers to the time St Patrick was said to have proclaimed these words.  On a perilous journey to Tara, afraid of being attacked by marauding Celts, he chanted the words with his frightened men. The words acted a protection by disguising them as a group of deer as they crept across the countryside.

Draws us in to comtemplation

In order for this relational aspect of the Trinity to work, there has to be a sense of spaciousness.  And so for us, there has to be times for solitude, for contemplation, meditation.  And in these times of letting go, we can face ourselves as we truly are known before God. This understanding of life in God is, at least in part, is coming to the early Celtic Christians from the aestheticism of the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the East.  As our poet Marbhan found, by leaving behind the complications and demands of political life for an even more challenging one - as hermit or in a monastic community he has been enabled to enter more deeply close communion with God.  In our own lives today, either short periods of meditation each day, or periodic days of retreat can allow us to go deeper into ourselves.  There too, we can see the false Gods we have created: hang-ups about money, fear of growing old, the power of fear itself.  It’s during this time of withdrawal that we can be more open to God’s call in our lives.

                Calls us on journey

In our reading this morning, Jesus is bidding his disciples to go forth.  He hands them the mystery of the Trinity and asks them to build communities in his name. They are called to journey on.

Celtic Christians had a firm belief in life lived as journey in the name of Christ.  The idea of pilgrimage, or peregrinatio, a journey undertaken expressly to deepen ones experience of God in the world, reveals how they understood that we are not called simply to make our lives as comfortable as possible.  Like these first disciples, as committed Christians we are called to move on. Whether, as in Columcille’s case who founded Iona, we have penance to do for some wrong doing, which for him turned out to be his gift. Or like Columbanus who founded Gubbio in Italy, is a call to spread the faith.  Or simply, in an ordinary way, to move on in terms of deepening our own selves in our faith community, stretch our thinking, help bring about a little more good into the world - we are called to journey. No matter how we experience the call - we must remember that we are a pilgrim people.   One thing we learn for certain in life is that change happens.  And the wisdom and guidance, the open text of the Trinity helps us through, helps us negotiate this change. 

John O’Donohue, who has written about Celtic Christianity, tells us that in the Gaelic language, there is no single word for ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ - it’s always something like: God be with you, or God bless you.  And here, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus says: I am with you until the end of the age, he too is pointedly not saying goodbye to the disciples, but I bless you, I bless you in the strong name of the Trinity.