Food From Truth
"A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it" C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 'Introductory'.
Incarnation
You know those “Comments” that people leave on blogs and website discussion boards? I look at quite a lot; often, I leave comments of my own. Recently I saw one – presumably from a Muslim – saying: How could it be possible for God to have a son? Well, the commenter might have been thinking literally; many people think of the ‘Sonship of God’ as somehow literal. Thinking of God in the literal terms presented in parts of the Bible is obviously a mistake – God is not really to be understood as in the least human-like; of course God is not a man or a person as we are. And yet that is how God chose to self-reveal to humans, and that form, or forms, are important hints at the reality of things, they were given to us like that intentionally. How else could we (temporal fleshly beings) think of God, or conceive of God? (Unlike others, I should explain, I am not of the view that humans could have thought up the idea of God on their own; I consider that the notion of God having to be thought up, by humans, is ludicrous.)
God as understood in the early Judaic faith, as in the old Testament scriptures, is person-like from the beginning (a He, He walks, talks, and acts; at times – some will say – He is all-too-human); but He is still remote, hidden; He is still an It, and should we conceive of It in slightly more remote terms (ie. purely transcendent) then blind obedience, and no more, is all that would be possible (no chance of a personal relationship).
A purely-transcendent, remote being, simply demanding obedience, is a god that may control and order everything, but it is almost a god that need not exist for us, or at least one that may be irrelevant to us and the world. A god that causes everything to happen (or not happen) that happens is really no different from a god of nature, or pure materialism itself.
It is the reality of humankind, the human situation, and the need for humanity to be restored (this, not the nature of God) that required not just the analogy and imagery of person-like-hood, but the reality of humanity, the emergence of God into humanity.
Only Jesus – the man-god – could confront people directly, face-to-face (now, as when he walked the earth), only a divine person could require individual choice and decision, and offer – create – an individual, eternal, relationship of love.
Christmas 2011
Temporality
Little more than a chip flown off from the solid stone of eternity,
A fragment, this, melted and flowing, running, never still:
Time, the so-fast river we all run in, racing – for us – to its end;
But it, too, will reach conclusion, cease also, for that is the nature of frantic motion,
It runs to its end, ineluctably.
And then will return all its ways and things to solidity, totality, to what it always is.
And that is why my present choices and decisions are one with true predestination,
Since all is truly set beyond my present choosing
(At times, in my fancy, I glimpse, peer, beyond this life, at all that always was, always is;
a tiny opening.
Our inability, though, to recall aught before this life is one with blindness to that beyond; veiling.
How might the temporal the eternal scan?)
Eternally real though, the fragment’s source (the only reality) for all that.
2010
Sacrament
Indeed, he has no hands but our hands,
To do his work of helping, showing, upholding;
But these hands are hands that have held, in their palms,
The soft, fragile form of an oh so-vulnerable one,
He in his weakest and smallest;
Yes, a little thing, white, and brittle-seeming.
Surely, he has no mouths but our mouths,
To speak his words of wonder, comfort and constrain;
But this mouth is a mouth that has held within it, briefly,
The full shock of his presence,
Disquiet almost … glory …indefinable warmth …
Weak, brittle - but of a power I could not begin to know,
Not comprehend or analyse,
Only look back, longingly,
at how this secret moment
Has worked its loving ministry
In all my otherwise-drabness.
I have words, many words,
Words that can scan and snare a myriad things,
Throw out to view, expose;
But I have no words to hold, embrace, this wondrousness,
Sort it out and slice it, open it to others’ view;
Convince them.
2010
Rejection
Even the harsh, hard straw scratched at his thin salted flesh, in the place he was laid,
Refusing the soft tenderness of any warm caress, gentleness, even in his earliest beginning;
- And see how Christmas sentiment makes the warm, adoring tongues of peaceful beasts
Lap against him, lovingly,
Where, in reality, their angry hunger perhaps pushed him roughly aside
(Not enough, it was, for worried parents to be thrust into an outhouse, in the first place).
This is not our home, this thing of earth, and now-ness, the familiar fact of being in a known place,
Known before aught was known.
For if the world of first experience throws one out (angered, more embarrassed, probably),
as it did him, Then the whole world is alien, other.
Surely not our home, this scrap of moving earth, this passing, this ending moment,
Gone before present;
A place outraged at us, shocked.
But not a shock to him.
Important, at the centre, was his owns’ transience, shallowness,
For only when it came in power, Spirit, could the things of our world solidify to certainty, resolve,
Capacity to change everything, all;
Till then, those around him, no less than any, folded and feared, rushed back to safe certainties –
Such they surely appeared; compliance, silence,
The same non-opposition to all, that mars our latter-day leaders - weakness.
Solid becoming, also, were the awkward strands,
For even soft straws can easily harden to thorns,
Easily, also, enmesh to serve harsh cruelty,
Turn hardness into sharp pain,
Stiffness wreathed, entangled, into a mocker’s ring,
That runs and writhes in circles to flaunt its stained victory.
Only seeming so, however, since only the once could our rejection work; it will not the next.
2009
- Some of the images of this poem were inspired by some words of G. W. Target:
“ … Nazareth of Galilee, where He was now so entirely without honour that He had been thrust out of the synagogue by His wrathful fellow-citizens, ... for preaching that He Himself, Joseph the carpenter’s son, was the fulfilment of scripture …” – p. 37
“His mother bore Him, then, flesh made God, God made flesh, tended Him, washed Him in water to supple Him, rubbed Him in salt, as was the custom, suckled Him … … And a manger for the child, with straws almost as sharp to His tenderness then as the thorns after, His first bed as uneasy at first as His Cross at last.” – p. 57.
- G. W. Target, Watch with me. Spiritual exercises towards learning the lesson of penitence and humiliation at the foot of the Cross, London, Gerald Duckworth, 1961.