Jameswoodward’s Weblog

Gaze at the river. It is time and water.
Remember that time is itself a river
Know that we too recede always into the past.
See all of our faces flow by, like a river

and feel that to wake up is only to dream again
and that each of those dreams is as real
as the other; and that the death
which we fear so much is nothing but sleep.

Know that a day, or a year, is only a sign
for every one of all of your days and your years;
and so transform the discourtesy of ageing
into music, rumour, a system of signs, no more.

See, in death, sleep; see, in that twilight
a melancholy gold. That is what poetry is,
immortal, modest, returning always
like every sunset, like every dawn.

Sometimes in the evening mirror
we see our own gaze, looking back at us;
art must be just such a mirror
that shows us nothing but who we are.

It is said that Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love, when he came home:
back to Ithaca, so modest, so green. Art
is that Ithaca, that unremarkable eternity.

It is also an unending river, a mirror
which flows on by and still stays still;
reflecting the me that stares at itself,
always the same, always changing.

Borges, Arte Poetica

 “Grey towers of Durham,

 Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles,

 Half church of God half castle against the Scot, A

nd long to roam these venerable aisles,

 With records stored of deeds long since forgot”.

Sir Walter Scott

Promising myself before bedtime
to contend more urgently
with the problem. From nothing
nothing comes. Behind everything –
something, somebody? In the beginnning
violence, the floor of the universe
littered with fragments. After
the enormous brawl, where
did the dove come from? From what
acorn mind these dark
boughs among which at night
thought loses its way back
to its dim sources, onward
to that illuminated citadel
that truth keeps? Light’s distances
are without meaning and unreconciled
by the domestic. I pit my furniture
against the emptiness that is beyond
Antares, but the equation
is not in balance. There are no cushions
for the emotions. Thermodynamic
cold or else incineration
of the planet – either way
there is no hope for the species.
Are Sophocles and Mozart sufficient
justification for the failure
to find out? Beyond
the stars are more stars where love, perhaps,
or intellect or the anonymous is busy.

R..S. Thomas, No Truce with the Furies

‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not’ is indeed a basic formula for the ideal truth inherent in Christlikeness.

 ‘Take up your cross’, says Jesus to his disciples, ‘and follow me’. For that is how God is revealed – first and foremost, on the cross. Properly interpreted, the symbol of the harrowing of hell captures the very essence of revelation.

 Above all, God’s love is just what shines through the mixture of profound respect and compassion evoked in those who witness that quality of resoluteness, in the afflicted, which Jesus on the cross represents, and who do not turn aside, but let themselves be truly confronted by it.

Look at love…
how it tangles
the lover and the beloved

look at spirit
how it fuses with earth
giving it new life

why are you so busy
with this or that or good or bad?
pay attention to how things blend

why talk about all
the known and the unknown
see how unknown merges into the known

the beloved grows
right out of my own heart
how much more union can there be?

Rumi

Lord, said David, since you do not need us,
why did you create these two worlds?

Reality replied: O prisoner of time,
I was a secret treasure of kindness and generosity,
and I wished this treasure to be known,
so I created a mirror: its shining face, the heart;
its darkened back, the world;
You might like the back, if you’ve never seen the face.

Spirit, find your way, let gravity draw you in.
Reason, tread the path of selflessness into eternity.

Remember God so much, that you are forgotten.
Let the caller and the called disappear.
Be lost in the Call.

Rumi

O come, O come thou living word,

and pierce our hearts with healing sword,

from God’s own mouth proceeding far

to lance the fest’ring wounds of war.

Rejoice! Rejoice! To mend our strife

Shall come in flesh the God of life.

– Jim Cotter, Expectant – Verses for Advent

Ordinary Christians are constantly being invited to forget their language.

 Clergy are also tempted to dilute  the force of the language we represent in an attempt to be relevant. Yet paradoxically the pluralist character of our society offers us, once again, the space to embody and articulate distinctive  Christian discourse without feeling the necessity to reduce this to a more limited secular speak. Indeed secular speak is itself less secure as a language game than many of its protagonists would I hope. Under the challenge of late or post-modernity it is increasingly being seen as a particular and relative dialect rather than a definitive and universally intelligible language.

The question which all this raises, therefore, is how ordinary Christian communities in this sort of society are going to recover their language and become confident, fluent speakers of this lan­guage. In some way the answer lies in the way languages emerge and are learned. If by language we mean the way we render intel­ligible the multiple signs which comprise creation and acknowledge that languages are intrinsically social, then lan­guages require communities in order to emerge and develop. Furthermore, if they are to remain part of that linguistic tradition, these communities need to be conscious of how their identity informs the way the language is spoken. Languages are dynamic rather than fixed, they develop in and across time and space and I are relational rather than idealistic. Conversation is where languages live, even as texts. Hence the character of the communities who speak a given language will be webbed into the tradition of this language, will be attentive to other speakers as well as hav­ing their own distinctive dialects.

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one
spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

Rabindranath Tagore, The garden