Christmas Poem

 

It's when we face for a moment

the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know

the taint in our own selves, that awe

cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,

to no innocent form

but to this creature vainly sure

it and no other is god-like, God

(out of compassion for our ugly

failure to evolve) entrusts,

as guest, as brother,

the Word.

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

"And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." Denise Levertov ends her poem with "the Word" (capitol W). The Word is God's not remaining in silent isolation from us but always expressing God's self — speaking, communicating, sharing, giving away God's own self. And this Divine nature, essential aspect or interface becomes a human being in Jesus, born of Mary. We call it the Incarnation. It is the heart of Christianity. Yet despite all the trouble to which God has gone, "our ugly failure to evolve" seems to be a constant with us. 

Donatello (1386-1466), the Italian Renaissance sculptor has gone to some lengths to make this plain for those who view his work: the Infant Jesus is squirming as baby's do, even tangled in Mary's veil. His tunic-shirt is pulled up, leaving the baby totally exposed. What's the point? Wouldn't it have been easier for the artist to carve folds of cloth instead of a baby's body? But Donatello wants to be sure we "get it" — God has become what we are. God has been born into a body like our own. "He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger." 

 In the Christmas Octave I send a blessing to you and your dear ones,

with good wishes for health and safety,

growth in the things that matter most to God's heart,

and with gratitude for our meeting here.

Mid April Snow

Robins flying low over the snow-lawn
   looking for bare spots
   under bushes or
   the tall trees at the edge of the woods.

Turkeys roost in the tops of 
   broad-branched Hemlocks—
   I don't like that lazy hunters would exploit
   these easy targets.

A second snowfall,
   when heavy, wet clumps
   come down from the White Pines ninety feet
   to make me laugh
   and wonder if the earth is trying to clean itself.

The drive is blocked with broken pine branches—
   thoughts of  Christ's Christmas birthing
   this week of Easter rising.

The snow-carrying forsythia bending to the ground
   making its yellow even more intense,
   and the feeling that while this has happened
   countless times before,
   hopes that the flowers
   are not spoiled.

And peach buds are swelled,
   each snow-capped,
   faintest pink
   like prevenient grace.

Lighting the candle by the Holy Mother's Icon,
   a silent, feeling-request for light and warmth—
   our poor world,
   machinated and bleak.

Another Summer Morning

While weeding this morning at the start of July,
at the top of its summer range,
a male Hooded Warbler
landed on a branch
three feet away, 
at the edge of the woods.
Olive green top,
yellow below,
black hood and throat, 
white flash in its tail,
its onomatopoeic song
emphatic and clear,
weeta-weeta-wee-tee-o.

The Dutch and Siberian Iris long spent,
the Japanese have now stepped in
to do their bit,
blooming full-flood.
Lavender and yellow-centered,
atop tall, strong, straight stems,
the petals stretch across 
an eight inch diameter,
elegant and dreamy.

Simple beauty:
like Bethlehem,
may it teach us to love
the things
that are deeply human.

Surviving Difficult Days

Reliquary holding the Crib of Bethlehem ~ Santa Maria Maggiore ~ Rome

These are difficult days. One television commentator said, "It seems as if the nation has veered off into shadow".  After the murder of five police officers in Baton Rouge, a mother broke down before the cameras and said, "Our children have lost the right to be safe on the street". And the host of a radio call-in show used the term "ammo-sexual" referring to the intense intimacy the nation shares with guns. 

Saint Paul tells us in the Letter to the Philippians that there is a Christian response to the world where it is warped and diseased:

Delight yourselves in the Lord, yes, find your joy in him at all times. Have a reputation for being reasonable, and never forget the nearness of your Lord. Don't worry over anything whatever; whenever you pray tell God every detail of your needs in thankful prayer, and the peace of God, which surpasses human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. My brothers and sisters I need only add this. If you believe in goodness and if you value the approval of God, fix your minds on whatever is true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and admirable." Philippians 4:6-8 

Recently while in Rome during the Jubilee Year of Mercy, my twelve year old friend Katie, made a visit to the chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore which houses the relic-crib of Bethlehem. We can see the boards of the crib through the glass "egg" in the photo here. In anticipation of her pilgrimage I asked her to write a poem-prayer as she sat in the chapel. Her poem is a true, honorable, just, pure, lovely and admirable stream of consciousness, where in an awake and attentive silence she allowed her mind to roam. 

A stable
  filled with hay
  with oxen and sheep
  with cows
  a donkey
  and mice by your feet.

There was a mother who gave birth to a king,
  a king in a stable, not a grand palace.
The animals knew of his power and love,
  and gave their manger,
  a king's crib made of wood.

The stable had sheep
The stable had hay
The stable had love
The love of  a king who would die for his people
The love of parents who would guide and protect
The love of a God who would save creation
  even if it meant he would die on a cross.

The manger is here
  still made of wood
  placed in a church
  in a case of glass and gold.

People come, who kneel
  and say their prayers to the king.
The stable and the manger
  not fit for an earthly king
  were all you needed on the day of your birth.

People come to admire your humility
  as shepherds and wise men did on that day
People still flock to what once was your crib
  to see the place where you laid your head.

KD

A Christmas Alphabet

A is for the Animals ~ the donkey and the cow.
B is for Bethlehem ~ meaning house of bread.
C is for Compassion ~ strong feelings of my heart.
D is for Dreariness ~ dispelled by Jesus' smile.
E is for Enosis ~ God's union-ing in Christ.
F is for Friends ~ name by which Christ calls us.
G is for Glad Tidings ~ angels' joyful news.
H is for Holy night ~ and the Happiness of God.
I is for the Icy hearts ~ which Jesus came to warm.
J is for God's Justice ~ what's best for all, not some.
K is for God's Kindness ~ Jesus hopes we will receive.
L is for Mary's Mother-Lap ~ where humanity may rest. 
M is for Miryam ~ Her Aramaic name.
N is for Nothing ~ is impossible for God.
O is for Ornery ~ this stubborn world Christ walks.
P is for Peace on Earth ~ God's hope, wish and gift.
Q is for Quirinius ~ who was governor at the time.
R is for Rescue ~ hand of Jesus when we're lost.
S is for Shepherds ~ Holy Infant's first guests.
T is for the Tomb of Jesus ~ foreshadowed by the cave.
U is for the Underworld ~ where Jesus shone his light.
V is for Vespers ~ evening praise of Christmas.
W is for this World ~ which God has loved so much.
X marks the spot ~ where Love's yet to conquer hate.
Y is for Yes ~ Mary's answer to the angel.
Z is for Zephyr ~ gentle breeze of  Christ's presence. 

Father Stephen P. Morris

It's Already Spring!

Magnolias Autumn Buds

Putting the garden to bed this time of year: washing tools and reorganizing the shed, bringing in clay pots to keep them from cracking with the ice, heaping up spent vines on the compost heap. But also planting bulbs and green manure. Digging in the new grasses I found at the nursery end-of-season 40% off sale! And watching and observing ~ the leaves of trees, the birds, the sky, the animals, the temperatures, the sun's light, the berries...

Then my sister sent four 12th century Japanese poems about the four seasons and suddenly I discovered one of them present of actualized in my garden here. So I wrote my own 21st century, Starlight, Pennsylvania version. Just a few lines.

Bay Magnolia's buds are set,
Winter Rye is scattered,
Blue Grass roots are settling in,
Spring is here already.

The spring or new life is already present in the buds, the seeds, the roots ~ and in my imagination, energy, personal history, creative possibilities and potentiality. The discoveries may well take time; we might need some help, but there's no shame in that.

Even in the old wounds, the personal misfortune or upset, the resolution, insight, growth, learning, are already present. Often it is so close we don't see; we miss it. 

We might try to catch an idea or inspiration that passes through our minds. Seize it! Write it down! We're getting older, we can lose it in a moment. And then hold the idea and let it ferment a bit: to write, to compose, to work in a new way with any kind of material: flour, dreams, watercolor, paper and pen, soil and seeds, fabric, clay, journaling. Maybe it's a book that's been sitting for too long, waiting to be read.

I Never Noticed That Before

Wreath Goldenrod

All that's known of Minnie Aumonier is that she was an early 20th century English poet who wrote two books of garden verse. There are poems that cause us to feel like the little mouse in the maze or the way we feel when we enter a thoroughly dark room patting down the walls in a frenzy hoping to find the light switch. But garden verse is usually very accessible.  She wrote:

When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, 

there is always the garden.

and

There is always music

amongst the trees

in the garden,

but our hearts must be
 very quiet to hear it.

Maybe your garden is a few potted plants on a bright window sill, perhaps rows of beans, a pumpkin patch, or some blue berry bushes. When I taught second grade in New York City years ago each October we tied plastic window boxes to the building (three floors up) and planted tulip and hyacinth bulbs and crocus corms. 

Here at the retreat house I'm realizing the best part of the garden is found naturally along the edge of the woods. That's where I made this late August discovery of Blue-stemmed Goldenrod, sometimes called Wreath Goldenrod. 

The very yellow flowers form little clusters nicely spaced along the arching stems. The leaves are elliptical, pointed at both ends and slightly serrated or toothed along the edges. The wildflower field guide (Eastern Region) says that Wreath Goldenrod is found from Ontario, then east to Nova Scotia, then south to Florida, then west to Texas and Oklahoma and north to Wisconsin. My goodness! 

Wreath Goldenrod is an American Native - not a European or Oriental import. Its bright flowers invite a closer look and thoughts of: lovely, delicate, charming, vulnerable.

Do we look mindfully and carefully enough that we at least sometimes (if not often) say, "I never noticed that before." 

Something else Gerard Manley Hopkins said

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was born in England, educated at Oxford and ordained a Catholic priest in Ireland. Perhaps believing his new style of poetry to be incompatible with the austerities of Jesuit life, Hopkins' poems were not published until after his death. His most well known poem is The Wreck of the Deutschland.  

The German ship S.S.Deutschland came apart between midnight and morning, December 7, 1875, after battling a near month long storm. Rescue efforts were slow and inadequate. Word spread of the ships demise whereupon men from neighboring villages converged on the beach to loot the corpses that washed up on the shore.

Among the dead were five Franciscan nuns who were headed to America, escaping the Falk Laws persecution of Catholics in Germany. Hopkins, so disappointed and revolted by this looting, dedicated the poem to the memory of the nuns. Near the end of the poem he writes:

Dame at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward
Our King back, Oh upon English souls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us,
be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls...

Dame at our door. "Dame" is a way of addressing an English nun. At our door: The German nuns washed ashore - at England's door.

Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Hopkins is asking the prayers of the nuns who drowned and were looted - perhaps the silver crucifix ripped from their side beads.

Our King back, Oh upon English souls: Hopkins prays for his nation to know Christ again. St.Thomas More (16th c.) said of his own country: "England would have yawned at the Sermon on the Mount." And our own nation?

Notice then that Hopkins uses easter as a verb and not a noun. Let him easter in us. As if to say: Let Christ raise us up to be a new creation - a new, transformed kind of human person. 

Then: Be a dayspring to the dimness of us. Dayspring is the precise point on the horizon where the light of the sun appears to begin the new day. Let Christ return to this country to begin in us a new way of being a people.

The words easter, dayspring, crimson-cresseted and brightening signify change: to brighten our human dimness. The dim heart of the nation. The dim heart of the Church. The dim heart of corporations and committees, commissions and classrooms. The dim conscience: lying, enabling, violent, manipulating, turning-the-blind-eye, blaming and rationalizing.

And I would add, Let Christ easter in us: this United States which allows through machination and interpretation the trafficking of organs, tissues and cells harvested from aborted babies.  And then, further twisting it up, makes it sound charitable, philanthropic and altruistic, claiming these stolen body parts help science and medicine to cure childhood and other diseases. Looting!

Americans were "shocked and appalled" (self-righteous people love those words) when it was reported that the Chinese were harvesting the organs of executed prisoners. We're no different. This country forfeits all claims to the word exceptional so long as fetal looting-remains on the national conscience - the smear of blood-money on the national hands.

Holy Gerard Manley Hopkins,  

grieved at the looting, 

pray for Christ-God to easter in us!

Dappled Things

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a 19th century Catholic convert, an English Jesuit and poet. His style was new and lots of folks don't like new, so his poems weren't published until after his death. How blessed are we then! 

For this poet-priest, God's Revelation and nature go hand in hand. This past week I re-discovered his poem, Pied Beauty, which I remember studying in college English at St. John's University in New York. I don't remember what the professor said about the meaning of the poem, so I've done my own study and reflecting and am pleased to share some of that with you.  Here's the poem:

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

The Latin motto of the Jesuit Fathers is Ad maiorem Dei gloriam - To the greater glory of God. And so, like bookends, the poem begins and ends with a declaration of God's Glory.

Then for some verses Hopkins teases out where he witnesses God's glory in things that are dappled - that is, spotted and varied. Like the sky when colors touch each other as at sunrise and sunset or if a storm is approaching or light is coming through clouds. Or a spotted cow.

I came across a stream once which was packed with trout all swimming gently upstream. And the sunlight made them shiny and their colors intense as they moved the way fish do. Dappled.

And then for a moment the poet changes direction and takes us from these things that are real and observable outside to the inner reality of our souls in all their variety, using the image of chestnuts that are roasted and glowing (Fresh-firecoal) as they burst open. Then simply the beauty of finches' wings.

Making my descent into Dublin Airport years ago I was indeed taken by the fields over quilted hills and all the various shades of green depending upon the light and whether the field was resting (fallow) or planted and with what: sugar beets, oats, wheat, barley, potatoes. 

Then Hopkins makes a very sensitive move as he considers us - human persons hand in hand with the creator. Us - in all our variety and with our tools and the things we make and use (trades, gear, tackle and trim). He thinks about us in our original ideas and inventions. 

And us where we don't understand or are ignorant (like the rejection of his new kind of poetry) or where human variety is undervalued or known only remotely, by hear-say or prejudice (fickle, freckled), or to which we are not accustomed (who knows how). This is very wonderful as we often tend to value only what is orthodox, approved, acceptable, sanctioned, allowed, legitimate, lawful. My goodness! 

Instead, Hopkins is saying: Oh let's not be so stingy with our appreciations ~ God has made it all (He fathers-forth). Look! Every aspect and every one, even that which we don't acknowledge~in the variety and contrasts (swift/slow) and what we're blind to (adazzle) ~ Look! all of this and all of these are of God's one and beautiful creation. Let us Praise God in this!

And I'm thinking of people who have done incomprehensibly hideous things: each of them was once someone's dearest little boy or girl. Or maybe they were not and should have been.

Wow! If we could only accept this - what love there would be! What peace! What justice! But this is very hard for some people - inconceivable really.

The Swallows of Lourdes

HERE IS A MARVELOUS picture of the candlelight procession that forms each night at Lourdes where the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette eighteen times in 1858.  As the light-procession gets underway, many dozens of swallows appear, flying over the great gathering. No mystical claim is being made. Someone will say, "Oh, the swallows are only interested in the bugs drawn to the light." So. That should never keep us from acknowledging the beauty of it, and what we might realize underneath, so to speak. 

The swallows seem to be stitching heaven and earth together - repairing the spiritual tear opened by the world's hatreds and failures in justice and love. My sister pilgrim-ed with us in 2004, working at the Accueil Notre Dame, the hostel for the sick. At the end of her trip she wrote this poem called a waka (following a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern).

The Saint's foot-path snakes
in candle-light procession - -
Cathedral swallows
drop from the sky -- their soft 'whoosh',
breath between Hail, Holy Queens

Karen Morris ~ July '04