Heart in Pilgrimage, the title of this series of talks, is taken from George Herbert’s
poem Prayer, of which you have a copy in your hand and to which I shall return. I chose
it as a title, because the phrase - heart in pilgrimage - suggests that prayer is as essential
to our spiritual being as a heart beat is to our physical being. But it suggests too that
prayer is more than a cognitive or intellectual exercise (although, as we shall see, the
mind has its part to play in prayer). Prayer involves our senses, our intuitions and our
emotions and, most of all, our imagination. But the heart in pilgrimage also suggests
that prayer is a spiritual journey, of discoveries and encounters along the way. Prayer is a
dynamic process of growth, movement and surprise. with moments of refreshment and
rest along the way, which may also at times take us through deserts and wilderness, and
arid or terrifying landscapes. But pilgrimage, though it can be a solitary endeavour, is
most often an accompanied journey. We do not travel alone. We travel with companions
- literally bread-sharers. And that maybe is a good description of the church at its best -
a company of travellers who share their bread and sustain us in our common quest. And
a pilgrimage also suggests a direction of travel, a destination towards which we travel,
and gives point and purpose to our journey. It’s a rich idea both in the Old Testament
which tells the history of the wandering people of God, and in the New Testament
which returns to the pilgrimage refrain with such verses as ‘we have here no abiding city
but we seek one to come.
George Herbert ends his sonnet on Prayer with the words ‘Something Understood‘ as
though at the end of our pilgrimage we arrive, all is made clear, the penny as it were has
dropped. Prayer is something like that - a penny dropping, a moment of insight or
disclosure when things make sense. Prayer is like that - not really getting it, often being
in a muddle, but occasionally the penny drops. A few years ago I wrote the text for an
oratorio called Resurrection for which my partner Simon McEnery wrote the music. The
text was based on the Resurrection appearances narrated by St John in his gospel. One
of the movements goes like this:
We didn’t get it - not for a moment
The sense that the Kingdom is close
As close as breathing
Nearer than hands and feet
We didn’t get it
Or maybe just for a moment
As he scanned the horizon
Or the sideboard of life
Or the clamour of the market
To find the ikon
To open our eyes
To find the word
To penetrate our deafness
He offered us
The birds of the air
The fish in the sea
The flowers in the field
And he drew God for us
In their company
But our minds focussed
On the weight of the catch
The price at market
The cash flow and bank repayments
He tried that too
Pearls of great price
Taxes for Caesar
Sharp business practices
We didn’t get it: not for a moment
Or maybe just for a moment
As we caught the drift of his mind
The whiff of his silence
The pebble dropping into the void
And rippling against the banks of our minds
Or the blanks of our minds
We weren’t prepared for Easter
Though the landscape had been changing
To us he was the gardener, the fellow traveller
The cook upon the sea shore, up before the rest of us
It didn’t take time when it happened
In an instant, when the penny dropped
We saw and were seen
We loved and were loved
Everything remained the same
And everything had changed for ever
In the twinkling of an eye
Prayer is sometimes like that - a moment of revelation which deepens the colour of
everything, causes you to see what has always been there, but perhaps never been seen
so vividly. That is why I guess Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven as being upon
his hearers, close by, within their grasp but all too often ignored or invisible to their preoccupied
minds. As he looked out to the far horizon or gathered images from the
sideboard of life he drew the contours of God’s Kingdom where the men and women
of his day were, - where they lived and moved and had their being. Christianity has
become a series of propositions, credal statements requiring assent, dogmatic utterances
demanding adherence. But it wasn’t always so. I often say that Christian faith is built
around five meagre ingredients - a name, a story, a piece of bread, a sip of wine and
each other. There’s more to it than that - we need the letters of Paul to reflect on the
name Jesus, - the name that is above every name, before which every knee shall bow in
heaven and earth and under the earth; we need the gospels to tell the story of Jesus - his
public ministry, his preaching and teaching, his miraculous works, his life of intimate
relationship with the Father, his compassion and care for the outsider, the marginalised
and the desperate, his inspiration and challenge to his followers and the culmination of
his whole life in his dying and rising. And as a way of taking that story and name of
Jesus into our own lives, and being part of his way, sharing his values and living the
ethics of the Kingdom he proclaimed, he gave us the remnants of a meal to share - a
fragment of bread and a sip of wine , over which he had said those startling words ‘This
is my body; this is my blood’ Through that meal sharing we become ‘companions of
Christ’ - literally bread sharers. As a result we have each other for we who are made one
bread one body - Christ’s bread; Christ’s body - have become, by grace, the church,
given to each other as part of God’s gift to each of us.
Many words have been penned and books written to amplify the Christology, the
sacramental theology and the ecclesiology that my initial five meagre ingredients of
Christian life suggested. Not all of them have been helpful or brimming with Christian
love, for words try to pin down what cannot be pinned down, express the inexpressible,
and either over-complicate matters or paradoxically over-simplify them. As we have tried
to define what we believe, or tried to distill the essence of faith, so we have moved
further from the truth, mired in words and arguments, and causing divisions and rifts to
appear between Christian communities and traditions. Sometimes those verbal
disagreements were reinforced by terrible brutality and blood letting. We would like to
think that such implacable religious hostility was a thing of the distant past, but the
Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the events in many parts of the world in the last few
months suggest that religions still have their part to play in fomenting rather than
resolving the world’s disorder. We can’t put social mayhem caused by the religious
bigotry of the few down to the inherent divisiveness of Christianity or Islam or Judaism
- the issues are too complex for such simplistic definition. But the religions of the Book
- the great Abrahamic religions - do have a capacity it seems for over-stating, overdefining,
over-articulating what is truly beyond statement and definition, and locking up
their adherents within those religious prisons.
No doubt there is a place for doctrinal wordplay and argument and disagreement in the
search for truth, but it is important in all three Abrahamic traditions that the book and
its words - whether the Tanakh, the New Testament or the Qran - are complemented by
prayer and worship - a place and a posture where words are translated into prayer; a
place indeed which moves us beyond words into a place and a posture of silence.
There is a wonderful passage in The Confessions of St Augustine where Augustine
itemises the attributes of God in a list of paradoxes (you have the quotation on your
leaflet) Augustine is driven to conclude that nothing can be said about God - supreme,
almighty and beyond words. What more can be said about God or in praise of him? And
yet woe betide me if I do not say it!
What, then, are You, O my God — what, I ask, but the Lord ourGod? For who is the Lord but the
Lord? Or who is God, save our God? Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most
piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained
of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing
old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing
nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet
possessing all things. You love, and burn not; You are jealous, yet free from care;You repent, and have no
sorrow; You are angry, yet serene;You change Your ways, leaving unchanged Your plans;You recover what
You find, having yet never lost; You are never in want, while You rejoice in gain; You are never covetous,
though requiring usury That You may owe, more than enough is given to You; yet who has anything
that is not Yours? You pay debts while owing nothing; and when You forgive debts you lose nothing. Yet,
O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what can any man say when he
speaks of You? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb.
Confessions of St Augustine
I love that passage because it poses the dilemma for all theologians and indeed for all
Christians who think about and care about their religion and the wisdom it imparts - to
say or not to say. We have to follow Augustine knowing that though there is nothing to
say as we come face to face with God - yet we must say it!
Yet even when we Christians move from the academy and the soapbox - where words
are everything - to the place of reflection and prayer we are confronted with yet more
words. Open your Book of Common Prayer, or your daily Missal, or your Common
Worship and you will find not blank pages - a tabula rasa - but page after page of words.
Prayer is words - lots of them!
(I have to admit that on one occasion my bluff was called. I opened my prayer book to
begin a service only to find that the book which looked so innocently like every other
copy of Common Worship actually contained only blank pages! ….)
Of course it was the Reformation that put the Word (that is the Word of God) centre
stage. The English bible was placed by law in every church, and the payer books of
Thomas Cranmer (1549 and 1552) were in English and the scriptures were read in the
liturgy in ‘a language understanded of the people’. Allied to the reading of scripture was
the priority accorded to preaching. Cranmer provided a book of homilies to help priests
stuck for a sermon to fill the gap. No wonder that Diarmaid McCulloch in his book
Silence: A Christian history, sees the Reformation period as inaugurating ‘one of the
noisiest periods in Christian history since its first two centuries : noise was the
characteristic of the mainstream Protestant reformation’. And in addition to the new
emphasis on the Word and the words which attended it, was the exclusion of the nonverbal
- ceremony, colour, vestments, incense, candles, the ring in marriage, and signing
with the cross in baptism, processions and veneration of saints. All these which were
part of medieval worship, giving substance and texture to the spiritual life of the people,
were at a stroke removed from the liturgy. And within the following hundred years the
situation grew even more dire as even music in church except for the chanting of
metrical psalms was forbidden, and Christmas itself was abolished under Cromwell’s
Commonwealth.
No wonder EM Forster in A Passage to India has one of his characters, Mrs Moore,
describe the faith as ‘poor, talkative, little Christianity’ because even the Word of God
has been submerged beneath the babble of human words.
In these talks I want t suggest that imagination is a key component in our understanding
and our practice of our faith (indeed I would dare to venture for understanding or
practicing any religious faith). Our theology is impoverished without imagination, our
worship and our liturgy are dry husks without imaginative creativity, our pastoral care of
people, our capacity to reach out to others, is entirely compromised without imagination.
And prayer is simply undoable unless we allow our imagination to be kindled. In the
next two talks I want to consider the imaginative contribution of artists and musicians to
our spiritual economy, and in the final talk I want to consider the contribution of silence
-from which all imagination springs - to the life of prayer. Today having so summarily
dismissed words, and the noisy clamour of wordy religion, I want to retreat from some
of my strictures and address the question implied in the title of today’s talk ‘How do we
find the words for prayer?’
If I were giving a talk on liturgy today I would want to remind us that liturgy is a
drama, literally a doing. And though we are suspicious of the idea of performance, lest
our worship should become like play acting, and more theatrical than prayer and praise
should be, performance is what we are about, and we are not just an audience, listening
attentively, but we are participants in the drama, co-celebrants whether or not we are
reading, or leading the prayers, or administering communion. Fortunately the modern
liturgical revisions of our church and almost every other mainstream Christian
denomination have restored to us the sense of liturgy as ceremony and rite, of action
and colour and gesture and movement that complement the words of the prayers.
Nevertheless the Book of Common Prayer and its successors do provide us with a
compendium of prayers that through constant repetition have passed into our spiritual
blood stream - not just the Lord’s Prayer, but the Collect for Purity, the Prayer of
Humble Access, the Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Confession from morning and
evening prayer. Cathedral choristers next door at Westminster Abbey and in the 43
cathedrals of England don’t know it but because they sing the Coverdale translation of
the palms in the BCP everyday they are exposed to some of the greatest literary texts in
the world. More than that they are committing to memory poems that may become part
of their prayer anthology for life. I didn’t appreciate the daily repetition of the psalms
when I was myself a cathedral chorister in Wales. But I appreciate it now because when I
go to visit someone in hospital, maybe someone coming to the end of their life, and I
want to pray with them, the psalms come immediately to mind, giving me words that are
both beautiful and true that consolidate my own faith and I hope give hope and comfort
to the visited.
O God thou hast searched me out and known me……..
The psalms and Cranmer’s collects as well as the prayers I have already mentioned
provide us with an anthology of words that can become part of our own personal
prayer. But more than that the liturgy also provides structure and order, a sequence and
a rhythm of prayer . You may not always or ever go to the cathedral here or elsewhere
for evensong or morning prayer. But whenever you hear the bell being rung calling the
faithful to worship - rather like the peasants in Jean Francois Millet’s painting The
Angelus - stop if you can for a moment and say a prayer (thank you God, or God bless
you to a stranger will do). For the bell tolling, and the prayer that is offered daily is open
to all, costs us nothing (actually it costs a fortune but that’s another story)and happens
every day whatever the circumstances. It is common prayer - and its embrace is wide and
welcoming and bidding us find that peace of God which passes all understanding. I
hope I have said enough about the liturgy and the daily offering of prayer which St
Benedict in his rule described as the opus Dei to convince you that though words are not
the only or the most important thing about prayer, they do provide a resource and a
stimulus to our imagination, and we do well to cultivate the tradition of prayer which the
daily office of the church represents, whether we gather with others in church or
cathedral or whether we find time at home (or even in the train using an i-phone app).
Praying regularly is like breathing ; its the heart in pilgrimage; it’s so common place as to
be taken for granted. But if it stops you would know all about it….or not!
In these talks I want to talk most of all about imagination in our spiritual repertoire of
gifts. Imagination doesn’t appear in the New Testament as one of the gifts of the Holy
Spirit which you will remember are listed by St Paul thus:
And yet the New Testament, cast as it is as a narrative, rather than a series of
propositions or a confession of faith or a work of philosophy - the New Testament
conveys the teaching of Jesus in a series of parables of unparalleled imaginative force,
that invite the hearer to inhabit the landscape sketched for us. We recognise in our
mind’s eye the road to Jericho, we see all too clearly the domestic tension caused by the
young lad wanting to take his inheritance and squander it in his own way, we all have
begun to make excuse when invited to some engagement that presents some kind of
challenge, or doesn’t quite fit our time table. Even when Jesus sits with his disciples and
preaches what is popularly known as the Sermon on the Mount he gives them startling
and unexpected clues to the way happiness might be attained - clues which need ears to
hear certainly, but also imagination in order to understand, inhabit and explore.
The bible invites us to use our imagination as a way of discerning the ways of God, as a
way of making connections, as a way of interpreting the world which we inhabit, making
sense of it, and of our place within it, and discovering the meaning and purpose of it
all. We may think that theNew Testament for example is narrowing the focus, becoming
more and more prescriptive, marginalising imagination ‘as the winds of false
doctrine’ (and there is certainly an element of that as St Paul for example says ‘There is
no other name…) But I am always amazed by the imaginative scope of the New
Testament as the narrative of Christ’s birth for example is taken by St Paul who never
directly refers to the birth of Christ or for that matter to barely any event in the life and
ministry of Jesus apart from the over-riding events that preoccupy Paul’s imagination,
namely the dying and rising of Jesus. Paul reflects on the whole redemptive scope of
Christ’s life from birth to death and sees there not a baby cradled in a manger but the
image of the invisible God the first born of all creation,
for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and invisible,
Thrones, dominations, Sovereignties, Powers -
all things were created through him and for him
Even the Book of Revelation which has too often been used by Christian
fundamentalists as a prescriptive piece of finger-wagging moralism, depicting in some
literal sense the judgement that awaits us if we don’t conform to the narrow precepts of
an unredeemed religion - even Revelation, if read for its metaphorical and poetical value,
becomes a source of human wisdom and insight into the mysteries of God.
I often think that when Jesus took his disciples to task for not seeing the obvious
glimmerings of the Kingdom of God in their lives and in the world around them, with
the words ‘O ye of little faith’ he meant to say ‘O ye of little imagination’!
We need to encourage our imagination, even if allow the tradition of scripture, and the
church and the inherited spirituality of the Christian past to interact with, be in dialogue
with, and sometimes act as a corrective to wilder flights of imagination.
My own introduction to prayer was on the lines of a shopping list - requests to
God to order the universe to my convenience or advantage (a la Gwen Raverat),
but two things jolted me out of my shopping list approach to personal prayer. The
first was a visit to France in 1969. I had been given a scholarship by my Cambridge
college which allowed me six weeks in France researching a subject of my choice. I
chose to visit a number of French Benedictine monasteries. For the first time I
encountered communities of men for whom prayer was away of life. Prayer for
them was not simply an add-on; something to be done when there was time and it
could be fitted in; a ritual for Sundays, or for a quarter of an hour each day - like
listening to the news. Yes, the monastic day was punctuated by communal prayer
when the community gathered for its Liturgy of the Hours or its Offices day and
night. But it never felt as though prayer was confined to or exhausted by those set
moments of formal prayer. When I asked the Frere Hotelier at St Benoit sur Loire
‘When is the next office’ he said ‘The next office is le repas - the lunch time meal’
As though to say prayer was not only about church going (important though that
is in the formation of the community); prayer - or the Opus Dei as St Benedict
called it - was being prayed when we ate together, when the monks gardened or
worked on the farm or in their glass factory, or prepared the monks’ meals or
welcomed a new guest or - most of all - when the abbey observed its habitual
silence - waiting on God. The Rule of St Benedict begins with the word Osculte -
Listen. Silence is for the monk the arena for the presence of God. For only in the
silence will God be heard and recognised. For the first time I met with and lived
among men (and later communities of women) for whom prayer was a way of life.
That was a complete eye opener. Prayer was not simply something one did. It was
something one was or could become. As a result I have kept my links with
Benedictine communities very strong, returning there - especially to French
monasteries - as often as I can, and taking groups of people, young and old with
me.
The other tipping point in my prayer evolution was I am sure linked to my
discovery of the Benedictine life. It was when I was a curate in Stepney, in
London’s east end. I was still praying with my shopping list - indeed my shopping
list approach proved a useful way both of recapitulating the day and preparing for
the next day. I am glad that note book in hand I remembered the people I had
visited that day at home or in hospital, the young who had visited my flat for
coffee and confirmation class, the boring PCC meetings or the equally riveting
Deanery Synod!
But at last I did begin to ask myself - is this what prayer is about? Is prayer a
shopping list of requests? And what happens when, as in Gwen Raverat’s case, it
doesn’t seem to work? Would I give up in a ‘final frenzy of despair’? Is prayer just
a bad idea? I think it was probably a combination of the Benedictine model which
had taken such a hold on my imagination, and working with Bishop Trevor who as
well as being a bishop (probably the most celebrated bishop in the church at the
time) was also a monk (a member of the Community of the Resurrection) I knew
that before he said Mass every day in his chapel he spent an hour or two on his
knees before the Blessed Sacrament in silent adoration. In my preparation for my
Lazard Scholarship visit to french monasteries I had read Geoffrey Moorhouse’s
book on contemporary monastic life Beyond All Reason - and there he described
the lives of members of the Little Brothers of Jesus, who before they went off to
their work as factory workers, or bus drivers, would also spend an hour before the
sacrament in silent adoration. Could it be that that was where prayer began? Not
with my agenda, my ambitious programme, my daily worries and aspirations?
Could it be that prayer begins with God - in and for himself - not as the
providential benefactor beyond our sight who might (or might not) answer the
prayers I so urgently presented; but as the source of all that is: the ground of our
being : from whom all we are and all we have derive, and to whom we shall return?
Could prayer lie not in words at all, with their peremptory demands, but with a
waiting and a listening - waiting on God? The priest poet RS Thomas had
something to say about this in his poem Kneeling.
Moments of great calm
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak: the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acte
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits, waiting as I,
For the message.
Prompt me God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
In our fourth session I will return to this theme of waiting and listening - to
contemplative silence as the beginning of prayer. However silence is not the usual
place for us to start an exploration of prayer. Prayers usually involve words,
concepts, talking, articulation. Open a prayer book and you are confronted with
words. No wonder Mrs Moore in EM Forster’s novel A Passage to India refers to
‘poor, little, talkative, Christianity’ full of empty rhetoric. RS Thomas talked about
a ‘staircase for silence’ but it seems not to be a staircase most Christians have
ascended in their spiritual quest. I shall as I say be thinking about silence in our last
session, but before we leave words let us think about them (as we shall in other
sessions think about music and painting) as stimulants to our imagination. I have
already quoted poetry as a positive influence in our understanding of prayer. Not
all words are ‘talkative’ or ‘argumentative’. Sometimes words kindle the
imagination, broaden our horizons, lift our hearts and minds to another world and
indeed bring us to a place of utter intimacy, integration and peace.
Words, I shall later be suggesting is not where prayer starts or ought to start - we
need to practice contemplation. But nevertheless we have probably been formed
in our praying by words more than anything. Those of us who are Anglicans have
inherited a liturgical tradition crafted by a martyred Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Cranmer, whose sense of rhythm, assonance, repetition and cadence,
allied with his understanding of the power of language, created a liturgical
tradition which, alongside the King James version of the bible, has shaped our
prayer and our understanding of God. And that tradition - even though the Book
of Common Prayer may have been superseded by other liturgical developments -
has informed the thinking and the liturgical intelligence and the prayer-crafting of
another generation of liturgists. Some of Cranmer’s collects are amongst the finest
prayers ever written in English, and Coverdale’s translation of the psalms is
peerless in its poetic sensibility.
The choristers in our English and Welsh cathedrals may not know it, but every
evening as they sing the psalms, they are being exposed to one of the oldest
literary texts in the world, and in their English translation, one of the most
beautiful. And because they repeat at least the evening psalms so often, the texts
become part of their spiritual repertoire for life. Their inner life - indeed our inner
life - is being shaped by poetry written 3,000 years ago, which still retains its
wisdom and power. Thanks to my own days as a cathedral chorister, when I go to
visit someone in hospital, and they ask me to pray with them, I have an anthology
of prayers to draw on, which I carry in my memory. Because it so powerfully
conveys the ever-constant, never-to-be-escaped presence of God, psalm 139
comes often to mind:
O God thou hast searched me out and known me…..
The words of the liturgy - not just the psalms - shape our life of prayer (and this
aspect of public worship in relation to personal prayer is considered in chapter ?).
Liturgical prayer is ‘common’ prayer - something we have in common with others,
something that we share. For Anglicans the phrase common as in The Book of
Common Prayer, or its successor Common Worship is freighted with meaning.
Thomas Cranmer’s genius in conflating the monastic Hours into the the offices of
morning and evening prayer, in simplifying the rubrics and complexity of the
liturgy, and most of all in translating the prayers and Mass of the Latin Sarum Use
into memorable and beautiful English prose, created prayers that all could use
together - not just the priests but the ‘common’ people too. And because of this
common usage the prayers of the liturgy became part of the personal prayer of
individual Christians. They knew about penitence and praise and thanksgiving,
because week by week the liturgy gave them the words to express these emotions
in addressing God.
And the words of Cranmer in his Prayer Books inevitably shaped the prayer and
the poetry of the finest poets in the English language - as well as the prayer of
ordinary men and women. Cranmer was martyred under Mary Tudor in 1556 :
William Shakespeare was born in 1564. As Shakespeare was growing up in
Stratford-upon-Avon, having been baptised in the parish church there and
attending that church week by week, he too would have been shaped by prayer in
English crafted by Cranmer - even though his mother at least was brought up in
the old Catholic obedience. And although the King James version of the bible was
not authorised until 1611 (just a few years before Shakespeare’s death) he would
almost daily have absorbed the cadences of Tyndale’s bible in English which was
the forerunner of the 1611 version.
Not only Shakespeare, but John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan,
Thomas Traherne and John Milton and so many other poets from this golden age
of English letters were not just influenced but shaped by Cranmer’s prayers and
the Authorised Version of the bible, and their imagination was kindled and their
own words honed by the words and phrases of these formative texts. It is not
simply that Shakespeare for example refers in his plays to 42 books in the bible, or
that at a conservative tally he makes well over a thousand biblical references, it is
that the stories of the bible and the phrases of the prayer book stirred up an
imaginative stream in the literary consciousness of generations of writers - in the
way that Greek and Roman myths and legends had done in the past.
But the traffic is not all one way. Many books have been written on the influence
of the prayer book and King James Version on the literary culture of Britain (not
just England) in the seventeenth and succeeding centuries. But it worked the other
way as well. Our prayer has been illuminated, extended deepened and made vivid
by poets, novelists and playwrights. And the quality they bring to our spiritual
awareness is that of imagination. And it’s this quality of imagination I most want
to talk about in relation to prayer.
In the following talks I shall be discussing music and painting in relation to prayer
and our final session will be devoted to prayer and silence, and today’s talk
concerns the imaginative power of words. Of course the Word is a two edged
sword. Words I want to suggest can release and stimulate the imagination. But very
often words are used (especially in a religious context) to stifle imagination. And as
we shall see religiously motivated authorities have burned books, destroyed
paintings and statuary, and circumscribed the potential of musicians precisely
because they, following in the steps of no less an authority than St Augustine of
Hippo, have been wary of the power of the imagination.
Words of course have often been used in religious contexts to define, pin down,
control and prescribe. The Word of God - made flesh and dwelling among us -
has been released into our midst for us to cradle and nourish and be nourished by.
And what does ‘poor, little, talkative Christianity’ do? It overwhelms the Word of
God with its own more important, hectoring, moralising words. And the bible, for
example, which should be for us, as it was for Shakespeare and generations of
English poets, a source of inspiration, profound wisdom and a clue to how we
might live life in preparation for heaven - the bible has become all too often a
series of moralising slogans - captured by words ; not released by The Word.
Often it is our creative artists, whether they share our faith or not, who in their
pursuit of truth, in their vision of our humanity and our world as it is and as it
might be, reveal our faith to us again, with freshness and new insight and
challenge. Their own imagination has been kindled in their pursuit of ‘whatever is
true, honourable, just and pure; by whatever is lovely and commendable’ (Phil 4,8)
and they in their turn have through their artistry and truthfulness kindled our
imagination - and so helped us to pray.
In developing this theme and supporting the thesis I have proposed I could begin
with the novels of Iris Murdoch or Barbara Kingsolver; or the plays of Peter
Schaffer or David Hare; or the work of any number of poets and past and present
to illustrate my point - that if we want to enter more deeply into the spiritual
experience, indeed if we want to learn anything at all beyond the surface of
religious knowledge then our imagination needs to be kindled. And sometimes
words (despite their limitations to which I have alluded) in the hands of an
imaginative intelligence can do just that. The imagination, clarifying the vision of
the creative artist, both precipitates us into the world as it is, and at the same time
reveals to us something we never knew, or had never seen or heard before, or had
never recognised or acknowledged. And at the same time the creative artist
provides us with somewhere to stand, to observe and absorb these two aspects of
creative dialectic - of seeing the world as it is and as it might be. That is what the
imagination contributes to our human consciousness and therefore to our spiritual
awareness. and more specifically to our life of prayer. The artist gives us
somewhere to sit or stand or kneel - in a place often of wonder - where we can
contemplate the world as it is and as it might be.
And God? Where is God in that process of revelation. Sometimes the divine is
specifically invoked - and the biblical narrative and the grammar of Christian
spirituality continues to provide the vocabulary even for the most secular of
creative commentators. But as we shall see the divine is not always invoked - or at
least not directly. Not all art is good of course, and not all art is truthful. But the
imagination of the great creative artists - whatever their medium and despite (or
because of) the inevitable flaws in their work - is leading us into truth. And I find
great encouragement in the words of the great twentieth century spiritual writer,
Simone Weil who wrote:
It seemed to me certain that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure
regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to himself, because before being Christ, he is
truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into
his arms.
So with Simone Weil’s authority let us look at three poems which might lead us
into the world of imagination. The first poem is by the early seventeenth century
priest poet George Herbert, who turned his back on a promising academic career
at Cambridge, where he was public orator and who also spurned a glittering life at
court, despite his aristocratic credentials. He preferred to take the parson’s gown
and for three short years, until his death in 1633, became the priest of Fugglestone
with Bemerton just beyond Salisbury, where he wrote most of the poems for
which he is justly renowned. This poem is appropriately called Prayer.
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
The poem ends with the phrase ‘Something understood’ in a typical Herbertian
resolution, as though we have arrived somewhere - though what has been
understood is never quite made clear! I described my early approach to saying
prayers as ‘a shopping list’. What Herbert offers us here is a shopping list, rather
like my juvenile prayers. Perhaps that is the point. Herbert’s poem is a list of things
that come to Herbert’s mind as he scans the world around him. There are, as you
might expect in a poem entitled prayer, some religious references - references to
the passion for example as he relates prayer to the intercession that Christ offers
on the cross: ‘Christ side-piercing spear’ with its typical Herbertian ambiguity and
condensing of ideas in a well-turned phrase. For the spear that pierced Christ’s
side recounted in St John’s gospel, brought forth blood and water - often
interpreted as divinity and humanity flowing together from the blood stream of
the dying Christ. Prayer releases that saving stream. But prayer is also the spear
that causes Christ’s dying agony. As though prayer, our prayer is caught up in the
world’s sin as well as its redemption.
I could take every phrase in this finely wrought sonnet and subject it to that close
analysis and so many ideas pour forth. Take ‘exalted manna’ for example - a
somewhat subversive phrase since it is a reference to the eucharistic host for which
manna (referred to in the Book of Exodus as food for God’s people) provides the
original type. But here it is also referencing the host raised (exalted) by the priest at
communion - or would have been raised by the priest until the Cranmerian
restrictions on the appropriate manual acts performed by the priest during the
celebration of the sacrament were imposed. The poet scans the horizon of the
rapidly expanding known universe ‘the milky way’, ‘the land of spices’, ‘church
bells beyond the stars’, - as though prayer might provide the connection between
earth and heaven, feed our deepest needs and sustain our journey through life:
‘soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’
and there is a moment in the poem where the jumble and clamour of competing
images finds some repose:
‘softness and peace and joy and love and bliss’
This poem is beautifully metrical, rhythmical and rhymed in the most English of
ordered verse forms - the sonnet. But for all its order and meticulous crafting and
deeper meanings, it is a shopping list. And it is intended to be, reminding us of St
Paul when he talks of prayer:
The Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit
himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words, making sense of our incoherent
groanings’ (Romans 8 v26)
It would be going too far to describe George Herbert’s Prayer as incoherent
groanings, but is he justified in ending his sonnet with the words ‘something
understood’? It is a shopping list after all - however well-crafted.
It is also the only poem I know in the English language that does not have a main
verb. And maybe that is Herbert’s point. This is a poem about prayer without a
main verb. As though the poet’s prayer - though the poet is himself the user of
words par excellence - is waiting for the verb to be supplied to make sense of the
shopping list. The verbum (Latin for the Word) the Word of God, made flesh and
dwelling among us, is the one thing needed to make sense of our inarticulate
groaning. That is why George Herbert can end his poem with the phrase
‘Something understood’. The penny has dropped.
This poem is not a prayer - despite its title (though many Herbert poems can be
used as prayers). But by the carefully contrived incompleteness of his sonnet, by
the myriad of images drawn from all quarters of the known world, by the
imagination he expends himself and then evokes from the reader, by demanding
thought and engagement in deciphering his shopping list he illuminates the
process and substance of prayer itself. We find we have been taken beyond a
shopping list approach to prayer by this shopping list approach to prayer!
Some two hundred and fifty years after George Herbert another priest poet
emerged who, had his poetry been published in his lifetime, rather than thirty years
after his death in 1889, the whole course of English poetry in the twentieth
century might well have been very different. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit
priest who spent some years at the Jesuit house at St Beuno’s in North Wales near
St Asaph. there he wrote many of his most famous and beautiful poems, including
God’s Grandeur:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
If George Herbert looked out at the world of his day with all its
inventiveness and new discoveries, and religious tribulation and change,
Hopkins looked out on a world of enormous beauty and fragility - especially
in the Elwy Valley where he then lived - the beauty of which was being
destroyed, and whose fragility was being exploited by the advances of science
and rough-shod capitalism. And he relates both the creation of the natural
order and its nineteenth century desecration to the biblical myths of creation
and fall.
In the opening octet we have the vision of God’s creation - flaming, shining
shaking, gathering, oozing, crushed - described in a series of energetic verbs.
And against this vision of divine creativity is placed human pedestrianism,
conveyed in the repeated, ‘have trod, have trod, have trod.’ In contrast to the
life-creating range of the divine activity human kind is ‘seared’, ‘bleared’ and
‘smeared’, and smudge and smell describe the fallen condition of humanity.
And so desensitised have men and women become to God’s grandeur that we
cannot even feel the extent of our own destructiveness - ‘nor can foot feel
being shod’. This poem written in the late nineteenth century, and published
at the end of the Great War, is a poem for our own day when ecological
issues become ever more pressing.
As a work of creative imagination this beautifully crafted poem offers
insights into the world we inhabit with all its beauty and fragility, and also
reveals the human capacity to exploit and abuse the paradise we have been
given. And Hopkins relates this to the primeval human capacity to disobey
God’s will for us, from the beginning of time. But the sonnet doesn’t end
there. Hopkins sees the capacity of the natural world to revive and survive.
‘For all this, nature is never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep
down things’. He is describing nature in its daily re-awakening, as he watches
dawn break in the Elwy Valley. But through the description of nature he
follows the nature trail more deeply and finds God himself revealed. In the
final part of the poem the natural world is infused with a sense of the Holy
Trinity. If we have a picture - as we have already observed - of the creating
God, the Father, in the first eight lines, displaying his grandeur, then in this
last section we find the death and resurrection of Jesus re-awakening us to
new hope and the promise of paradise.
‘And though the last lights off the black west went’
is an almost uncanny premonition of Edward Gray’s words as he watched the
lamplighters from his rooms in Downing Street and recognised as the world
tumbled into war in 1914 ‘that the lights are going out all over Europe’. Here
Hopkins recognises the even greater event of Calvary and the death of Jesus
as the sun disappears in the west. And then the line
‘Oh, morning, at the brown brink, eastward springs’
is a reference both to the daily miracle of sun rise and to the Easter dawn of
the resurrection.
The final couplet
‘Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’
recognises that though this world is still a bent world, it is a redeemed world,
because the Holy Ghost broods over it. The Holy Ghost seen not simply in
traditional Christian iconography as a dove of peace, but as the hen who like
Jesus himself longs to gather her chicks to her, and further the warm breast
suggests the pelican in her piety who according to legend plucked her own
breast to feed her young - as Christ sacramentally feeds us, despite our
‘bentness’.
This again isn’t a prayer: it’s a poem. But it engages our intelligence, it kindles
our imagination, it gives us a place to sit or stand, to consider the poles of
our human predicament - the world as it is and the world as it might be, by
God’s grace. And the bright wings of this poem brings us to a place of
tranquility, a place of contemplation. When I read this poem I am brought to
a place of silence. That has a lot to do with prayer.
The third poem in this series of words that bring us to prayer is, like George
Herbert’s poem, called Prayer. Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate and was
made a DBE in the 2015 honours list. Despite being brought up as a Roman
Catholic and attending a Catholic school (maybe because of these
circumstances) she is not a Christian believer, but as is so often the case those
who do not believe or can’t cope with our religion with all its collusions and
compromises often reveal to us truths about our religion and the practice of
it that have either eluded us or we have chosen to ignore.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
This poem evokes for me rather nostalgically the sights and sounds of my childhood. If
this poem is about prayer as I believe it profoundly to be, then it locates prayer within
the ordinary, the places which ordinary people inhabit, with the smells, sights, sounds
and memories of every day life. The idea of a ‘sudden gift’ in the midst of the humdrum
as a woman lifts herself from despair and has a vision of something better and brighter
- that sudden gift is a feature of prayer, as is the painful truth (‘that small, familiar pain’)
we would sooner avoid. Then something as ordinary as a train passing recalls a halfforgotten
memory: evoking perhaps the certainties of liturgical prayer (‘distant Latin
chanting’) even while all else is in flux.
‘Pray for us now’… there in the middle of the poem, a sense that we can’t pray, and we
need the prayerful companionship of others, not least that of the saints. For this is a
fragment of prayer taken from the most used of Catholic prayers:
Hail Mary, full of grace….
Holy Mary Mother of God
pray for us now….and at the hour of our death.
Meanwhile life goes on around us providing the substance of our prayer through its
very humdrumness - listening to next door’s child rehearsing piano scales, or hearing
another child who is called in from playing - perhaps suggesting the adult who in the act
of calling his or her child’s name, is remembering their own lost childhood. And the
poem ends with that most ordinary of daily occurrences, the shipping forecast for
inshore waters - part of the prayerful regularity that the radio provides.
Darkness outside: inside the radio’s prayer.
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finnisterre
God isn’t mentioned in this poem. Perhaps this is a recognition that prayer doesn’t
necessarily or always spring from within a confession of faith, within a system of belief,
or within a community of believers (despite the pray for us now). Maybe prayer arises for
us all at a point of need, a moment of extremis, when our resources run out. As the
first of the Beatitudes puts it in the New English Bible, Blessed are those who know
their need of God. Out of our need prayer is uttered, whether we are believers or not -
and the God who knows our need before we ask responds to our incoherent
murmurings.
One final thing about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem. On first reading it I thought what a trite
way to end a poem - rhyming prayer with Finisterre. Until it dawned on me that Finisterre
does not just provide a convenient rhyme. Like ‘something understood’ it provides a
profound truth. That prayer, - needy and incoherent though it almost certainly will be,
and redolent of everyday, sights, sounds and smells - takes us to finis terre, to the ends of
the earth - and beyond. And maybe prayer takes us to the place where this chapter
began, to the Moslem Mohamedou in Guantanimo Bay, ‘praying in his heart’.
‘Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me’.
poem Prayer, of which you have a copy in your hand and to which I shall return. I chose
it as a title, because the phrase - heart in pilgrimage - suggests that prayer is as essential
to our spiritual being as a heart beat is to our physical being. But it suggests too that
prayer is more than a cognitive or intellectual exercise (although, as we shall see, the
mind has its part to play in prayer). Prayer involves our senses, our intuitions and our
emotions and, most of all, our imagination. But the heart in pilgrimage also suggests
that prayer is a spiritual journey, of discoveries and encounters along the way. Prayer is a
dynamic process of growth, movement and surprise. with moments of refreshment and
rest along the way, which may also at times take us through deserts and wilderness, and
arid or terrifying landscapes. But pilgrimage, though it can be a solitary endeavour, is
most often an accompanied journey. We do not travel alone. We travel with companions
- literally bread-sharers. And that maybe is a good description of the church at its best -
a company of travellers who share their bread and sustain us in our common quest. And
a pilgrimage also suggests a direction of travel, a destination towards which we travel,
and gives point and purpose to our journey. It’s a rich idea both in the Old Testament
which tells the history of the wandering people of God, and in the New Testament
which returns to the pilgrimage refrain with such verses as ‘we have here no abiding city
but we seek one to come.
George Herbert ends his sonnet on Prayer with the words ‘Something Understood‘ as
though at the end of our pilgrimage we arrive, all is made clear, the penny as it were has
dropped. Prayer is something like that - a penny dropping, a moment of insight or
disclosure when things make sense. Prayer is like that - not really getting it, often being
in a muddle, but occasionally the penny drops. A few years ago I wrote the text for an
oratorio called Resurrection for which my partner Simon McEnery wrote the music. The
text was based on the Resurrection appearances narrated by St John in his gospel. One
of the movements goes like this:
We didn’t get it - not for a moment
The sense that the Kingdom is close
As close as breathing
Nearer than hands and feet
We didn’t get it
Or maybe just for a moment
As he scanned the horizon
Or the sideboard of life
Or the clamour of the market
To find the ikon
To open our eyes
To find the word
To penetrate our deafness
He offered us
The birds of the air
The fish in the sea
The flowers in the field
And he drew God for us
In their company
But our minds focussed
On the weight of the catch
The price at market
The cash flow and bank repayments
He tried that too
Pearls of great price
Taxes for Caesar
Sharp business practices
We didn’t get it: not for a moment
Or maybe just for a moment
As we caught the drift of his mind
The whiff of his silence
The pebble dropping into the void
And rippling against the banks of our minds
Or the blanks of our minds
We weren’t prepared for Easter
Though the landscape had been changing
To us he was the gardener, the fellow traveller
The cook upon the sea shore, up before the rest of us
It didn’t take time when it happened
In an instant, when the penny dropped
We saw and were seen
We loved and were loved
Everything remained the same
And everything had changed for ever
In the twinkling of an eye
Prayer is sometimes like that - a moment of revelation which deepens the colour of
everything, causes you to see what has always been there, but perhaps never been seen
so vividly. That is why I guess Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven as being upon
his hearers, close by, within their grasp but all too often ignored or invisible to their preoccupied
minds. As he looked out to the far horizon or gathered images from the
sideboard of life he drew the contours of God’s Kingdom where the men and women
of his day were, - where they lived and moved and had their being. Christianity has
become a series of propositions, credal statements requiring assent, dogmatic utterances
demanding adherence. But it wasn’t always so. I often say that Christian faith is built
around five meagre ingredients - a name, a story, a piece of bread, a sip of wine and
each other. There’s more to it than that - we need the letters of Paul to reflect on the
name Jesus, - the name that is above every name, before which every knee shall bow in
heaven and earth and under the earth; we need the gospels to tell the story of Jesus - his
public ministry, his preaching and teaching, his miraculous works, his life of intimate
relationship with the Father, his compassion and care for the outsider, the marginalised
and the desperate, his inspiration and challenge to his followers and the culmination of
his whole life in his dying and rising. And as a way of taking that story and name of
Jesus into our own lives, and being part of his way, sharing his values and living the
ethics of the Kingdom he proclaimed, he gave us the remnants of a meal to share - a
fragment of bread and a sip of wine , over which he had said those startling words ‘This
is my body; this is my blood’ Through that meal sharing we become ‘companions of
Christ’ - literally bread sharers. As a result we have each other for we who are made one
bread one body - Christ’s bread; Christ’s body - have become, by grace, the church,
given to each other as part of God’s gift to each of us.
Many words have been penned and books written to amplify the Christology, the
sacramental theology and the ecclesiology that my initial five meagre ingredients of
Christian life suggested. Not all of them have been helpful or brimming with Christian
love, for words try to pin down what cannot be pinned down, express the inexpressible,
and either over-complicate matters or paradoxically over-simplify them. As we have tried
to define what we believe, or tried to distill the essence of faith, so we have moved
further from the truth, mired in words and arguments, and causing divisions and rifts to
appear between Christian communities and traditions. Sometimes those verbal
disagreements were reinforced by terrible brutality and blood letting. We would like to
think that such implacable religious hostility was a thing of the distant past, but the
Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the events in many parts of the world in the last few
months suggest that religions still have their part to play in fomenting rather than
resolving the world’s disorder. We can’t put social mayhem caused by the religious
bigotry of the few down to the inherent divisiveness of Christianity or Islam or Judaism
- the issues are too complex for such simplistic definition. But the religions of the Book
- the great Abrahamic religions - do have a capacity it seems for over-stating, overdefining,
over-articulating what is truly beyond statement and definition, and locking up
their adherents within those religious prisons.
No doubt there is a place for doctrinal wordplay and argument and disagreement in the
search for truth, but it is important in all three Abrahamic traditions that the book and
its words - whether the Tanakh, the New Testament or the Qran - are complemented by
prayer and worship - a place and a posture where words are translated into prayer; a
place indeed which moves us beyond words into a place and a posture of silence.
There is a wonderful passage in The Confessions of St Augustine where Augustine
itemises the attributes of God in a list of paradoxes (you have the quotation on your
leaflet) Augustine is driven to conclude that nothing can be said about God - supreme,
almighty and beyond words. What more can be said about God or in praise of him? And
yet woe betide me if I do not say it!
What, then, are You, O my God — what, I ask, but the Lord ourGod? For who is the Lord but the
Lord? Or who is God, save our God? Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most
piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained
of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing
old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing
nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet
possessing all things. You love, and burn not; You are jealous, yet free from care;You repent, and have no
sorrow; You are angry, yet serene;You change Your ways, leaving unchanged Your plans;You recover what
You find, having yet never lost; You are never in want, while You rejoice in gain; You are never covetous,
though requiring usury That You may owe, more than enough is given to You; yet who has anything
that is not Yours? You pay debts while owing nothing; and when You forgive debts you lose nothing. Yet,
O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what can any man say when he
speaks of You? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb.
Confessions of St Augustine
I love that passage because it poses the dilemma for all theologians and indeed for all
Christians who think about and care about their religion and the wisdom it imparts - to
say or not to say. We have to follow Augustine knowing that though there is nothing to
say as we come face to face with God - yet we must say it!
Yet even when we Christians move from the academy and the soapbox - where words
are everything - to the place of reflection and prayer we are confronted with yet more
words. Open your Book of Common Prayer, or your daily Missal, or your Common
Worship and you will find not blank pages - a tabula rasa - but page after page of words.
Prayer is words - lots of them!
(I have to admit that on one occasion my bluff was called. I opened my prayer book to
begin a service only to find that the book which looked so innocently like every other
copy of Common Worship actually contained only blank pages! ….)
Of course it was the Reformation that put the Word (that is the Word of God) centre
stage. The English bible was placed by law in every church, and the payer books of
Thomas Cranmer (1549 and 1552) were in English and the scriptures were read in the
liturgy in ‘a language understanded of the people’. Allied to the reading of scripture was
the priority accorded to preaching. Cranmer provided a book of homilies to help priests
stuck for a sermon to fill the gap. No wonder that Diarmaid McCulloch in his book
Silence: A Christian history, sees the Reformation period as inaugurating ‘one of the
noisiest periods in Christian history since its first two centuries : noise was the
characteristic of the mainstream Protestant reformation’. And in addition to the new
emphasis on the Word and the words which attended it, was the exclusion of the nonverbal
- ceremony, colour, vestments, incense, candles, the ring in marriage, and signing
with the cross in baptism, processions and veneration of saints. All these which were
part of medieval worship, giving substance and texture to the spiritual life of the people,
were at a stroke removed from the liturgy. And within the following hundred years the
situation grew even more dire as even music in church except for the chanting of
metrical psalms was forbidden, and Christmas itself was abolished under Cromwell’s
Commonwealth.
No wonder EM Forster in A Passage to India has one of his characters, Mrs Moore,
describe the faith as ‘poor, talkative, little Christianity’ because even the Word of God
has been submerged beneath the babble of human words.
In these talks I want t suggest that imagination is a key component in our understanding
and our practice of our faith (indeed I would dare to venture for understanding or
practicing any religious faith). Our theology is impoverished without imagination, our
worship and our liturgy are dry husks without imaginative creativity, our pastoral care of
people, our capacity to reach out to others, is entirely compromised without imagination.
And prayer is simply undoable unless we allow our imagination to be kindled. In the
next two talks I want to consider the imaginative contribution of artists and musicians to
our spiritual economy, and in the final talk I want to consider the contribution of silence
-from which all imagination springs - to the life of prayer. Today having so summarily
dismissed words, and the noisy clamour of wordy religion, I want to retreat from some
of my strictures and address the question implied in the title of today’s talk ‘How do we
find the words for prayer?’
If I were giving a talk on liturgy today I would want to remind us that liturgy is a
drama, literally a doing. And though we are suspicious of the idea of performance, lest
our worship should become like play acting, and more theatrical than prayer and praise
should be, performance is what we are about, and we are not just an audience, listening
attentively, but we are participants in the drama, co-celebrants whether or not we are
reading, or leading the prayers, or administering communion. Fortunately the modern
liturgical revisions of our church and almost every other mainstream Christian
denomination have restored to us the sense of liturgy as ceremony and rite, of action
and colour and gesture and movement that complement the words of the prayers.
Nevertheless the Book of Common Prayer and its successors do provide us with a
compendium of prayers that through constant repetition have passed into our spiritual
blood stream - not just the Lord’s Prayer, but the Collect for Purity, the Prayer of
Humble Access, the Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Confession from morning and
evening prayer. Cathedral choristers next door at Westminster Abbey and in the 43
cathedrals of England don’t know it but because they sing the Coverdale translation of
the palms in the BCP everyday they are exposed to some of the greatest literary texts in
the world. More than that they are committing to memory poems that may become part
of their prayer anthology for life. I didn’t appreciate the daily repetition of the psalms
when I was myself a cathedral chorister in Wales. But I appreciate it now because when I
go to visit someone in hospital, maybe someone coming to the end of their life, and I
want to pray with them, the psalms come immediately to mind, giving me words that are
both beautiful and true that consolidate my own faith and I hope give hope and comfort
to the visited.
O God thou hast searched me out and known me……..
The psalms and Cranmer’s collects as well as the prayers I have already mentioned
provide us with an anthology of words that can become part of our own personal
prayer. But more than that the liturgy also provides structure and order, a sequence and
a rhythm of prayer . You may not always or ever go to the cathedral here or elsewhere
for evensong or morning prayer. But whenever you hear the bell being rung calling the
faithful to worship - rather like the peasants in Jean Francois Millet’s painting The
Angelus - stop if you can for a moment and say a prayer (thank you God, or God bless
you to a stranger will do). For the bell tolling, and the prayer that is offered daily is open
to all, costs us nothing (actually it costs a fortune but that’s another story)and happens
every day whatever the circumstances. It is common prayer - and its embrace is wide and
welcoming and bidding us find that peace of God which passes all understanding. I
hope I have said enough about the liturgy and the daily offering of prayer which St
Benedict in his rule described as the opus Dei to convince you that though words are not
the only or the most important thing about prayer, they do provide a resource and a
stimulus to our imagination, and we do well to cultivate the tradition of prayer which the
daily office of the church represents, whether we gather with others in church or
cathedral or whether we find time at home (or even in the train using an i-phone app).
Praying regularly is like breathing ; its the heart in pilgrimage; it’s so common place as to
be taken for granted. But if it stops you would know all about it….or not!
In these talks I want to talk most of all about imagination in our spiritual repertoire of
gifts. Imagination doesn’t appear in the New Testament as one of the gifts of the Holy
Spirit which you will remember are listed by St Paul thus:
And yet the New Testament, cast as it is as a narrative, rather than a series of
propositions or a confession of faith or a work of philosophy - the New Testament
conveys the teaching of Jesus in a series of parables of unparalleled imaginative force,
that invite the hearer to inhabit the landscape sketched for us. We recognise in our
mind’s eye the road to Jericho, we see all too clearly the domestic tension caused by the
young lad wanting to take his inheritance and squander it in his own way, we all have
begun to make excuse when invited to some engagement that presents some kind of
challenge, or doesn’t quite fit our time table. Even when Jesus sits with his disciples and
preaches what is popularly known as the Sermon on the Mount he gives them startling
and unexpected clues to the way happiness might be attained - clues which need ears to
hear certainly, but also imagination in order to understand, inhabit and explore.
The bible invites us to use our imagination as a way of discerning the ways of God, as a
way of making connections, as a way of interpreting the world which we inhabit, making
sense of it, and of our place within it, and discovering the meaning and purpose of it
all. We may think that theNew Testament for example is narrowing the focus, becoming
more and more prescriptive, marginalising imagination ‘as the winds of false
doctrine’ (and there is certainly an element of that as St Paul for example says ‘There is
no other name…) But I am always amazed by the imaginative scope of the New
Testament as the narrative of Christ’s birth for example is taken by St Paul who never
directly refers to the birth of Christ or for that matter to barely any event in the life and
ministry of Jesus apart from the over-riding events that preoccupy Paul’s imagination,
namely the dying and rising of Jesus. Paul reflects on the whole redemptive scope of
Christ’s life from birth to death and sees there not a baby cradled in a manger but the
image of the invisible God the first born of all creation,
for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and invisible,
Thrones, dominations, Sovereignties, Powers -
all things were created through him and for him
Even the Book of Revelation which has too often been used by Christian
fundamentalists as a prescriptive piece of finger-wagging moralism, depicting in some
literal sense the judgement that awaits us if we don’t conform to the narrow precepts of
an unredeemed religion - even Revelation, if read for its metaphorical and poetical value,
becomes a source of human wisdom and insight into the mysteries of God.
I often think that when Jesus took his disciples to task for not seeing the obvious
glimmerings of the Kingdom of God in their lives and in the world around them, with
the words ‘O ye of little faith’ he meant to say ‘O ye of little imagination’!
We need to encourage our imagination, even if allow the tradition of scripture, and the
church and the inherited spirituality of the Christian past to interact with, be in dialogue
with, and sometimes act as a corrective to wilder flights of imagination.
My own introduction to prayer was on the lines of a shopping list - requests to
God to order the universe to my convenience or advantage (a la Gwen Raverat),
but two things jolted me out of my shopping list approach to personal prayer. The
first was a visit to France in 1969. I had been given a scholarship by my Cambridge
college which allowed me six weeks in France researching a subject of my choice. I
chose to visit a number of French Benedictine monasteries. For the first time I
encountered communities of men for whom prayer was away of life. Prayer for
them was not simply an add-on; something to be done when there was time and it
could be fitted in; a ritual for Sundays, or for a quarter of an hour each day - like
listening to the news. Yes, the monastic day was punctuated by communal prayer
when the community gathered for its Liturgy of the Hours or its Offices day and
night. But it never felt as though prayer was confined to or exhausted by those set
moments of formal prayer. When I asked the Frere Hotelier at St Benoit sur Loire
‘When is the next office’ he said ‘The next office is le repas - the lunch time meal’
As though to say prayer was not only about church going (important though that
is in the formation of the community); prayer - or the Opus Dei as St Benedict
called it - was being prayed when we ate together, when the monks gardened or
worked on the farm or in their glass factory, or prepared the monks’ meals or
welcomed a new guest or - most of all - when the abbey observed its habitual
silence - waiting on God. The Rule of St Benedict begins with the word Osculte -
Listen. Silence is for the monk the arena for the presence of God. For only in the
silence will God be heard and recognised. For the first time I met with and lived
among men (and later communities of women) for whom prayer was a way of life.
That was a complete eye opener. Prayer was not simply something one did. It was
something one was or could become. As a result I have kept my links with
Benedictine communities very strong, returning there - especially to French
monasteries - as often as I can, and taking groups of people, young and old with
me.
The other tipping point in my prayer evolution was I am sure linked to my
discovery of the Benedictine life. It was when I was a curate in Stepney, in
London’s east end. I was still praying with my shopping list - indeed my shopping
list approach proved a useful way both of recapitulating the day and preparing for
the next day. I am glad that note book in hand I remembered the people I had
visited that day at home or in hospital, the young who had visited my flat for
coffee and confirmation class, the boring PCC meetings or the equally riveting
Deanery Synod!
But at last I did begin to ask myself - is this what prayer is about? Is prayer a
shopping list of requests? And what happens when, as in Gwen Raverat’s case, it
doesn’t seem to work? Would I give up in a ‘final frenzy of despair’? Is prayer just
a bad idea? I think it was probably a combination of the Benedictine model which
had taken such a hold on my imagination, and working with Bishop Trevor who as
well as being a bishop (probably the most celebrated bishop in the church at the
time) was also a monk (a member of the Community of the Resurrection) I knew
that before he said Mass every day in his chapel he spent an hour or two on his
knees before the Blessed Sacrament in silent adoration. In my preparation for my
Lazard Scholarship visit to french monasteries I had read Geoffrey Moorhouse’s
book on contemporary monastic life Beyond All Reason - and there he described
the lives of members of the Little Brothers of Jesus, who before they went off to
their work as factory workers, or bus drivers, would also spend an hour before the
sacrament in silent adoration. Could it be that that was where prayer began? Not
with my agenda, my ambitious programme, my daily worries and aspirations?
Could it be that prayer begins with God - in and for himself - not as the
providential benefactor beyond our sight who might (or might not) answer the
prayers I so urgently presented; but as the source of all that is: the ground of our
being : from whom all we are and all we have derive, and to whom we shall return?
Could prayer lie not in words at all, with their peremptory demands, but with a
waiting and a listening - waiting on God? The priest poet RS Thomas had
something to say about this in his poem Kneeling.
Moments of great calm
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak: the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acte
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits, waiting as I,
For the message.
Prompt me God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
In our fourth session I will return to this theme of waiting and listening - to
contemplative silence as the beginning of prayer. However silence is not the usual
place for us to start an exploration of prayer. Prayers usually involve words,
concepts, talking, articulation. Open a prayer book and you are confronted with
words. No wonder Mrs Moore in EM Forster’s novel A Passage to India refers to
‘poor, little, talkative, Christianity’ full of empty rhetoric. RS Thomas talked about
a ‘staircase for silence’ but it seems not to be a staircase most Christians have
ascended in their spiritual quest. I shall as I say be thinking about silence in our last
session, but before we leave words let us think about them (as we shall in other
sessions think about music and painting) as stimulants to our imagination. I have
already quoted poetry as a positive influence in our understanding of prayer. Not
all words are ‘talkative’ or ‘argumentative’. Sometimes words kindle the
imagination, broaden our horizons, lift our hearts and minds to another world and
indeed bring us to a place of utter intimacy, integration and peace.
Words, I shall later be suggesting is not where prayer starts or ought to start - we
need to practice contemplation. But nevertheless we have probably been formed
in our praying by words more than anything. Those of us who are Anglicans have
inherited a liturgical tradition crafted by a martyred Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Cranmer, whose sense of rhythm, assonance, repetition and cadence,
allied with his understanding of the power of language, created a liturgical
tradition which, alongside the King James version of the bible, has shaped our
prayer and our understanding of God. And that tradition - even though the Book
of Common Prayer may have been superseded by other liturgical developments -
has informed the thinking and the liturgical intelligence and the prayer-crafting of
another generation of liturgists. Some of Cranmer’s collects are amongst the finest
prayers ever written in English, and Coverdale’s translation of the psalms is
peerless in its poetic sensibility.
The choristers in our English and Welsh cathedrals may not know it, but every
evening as they sing the psalms, they are being exposed to one of the oldest
literary texts in the world, and in their English translation, one of the most
beautiful. And because they repeat at least the evening psalms so often, the texts
become part of their spiritual repertoire for life. Their inner life - indeed our inner
life - is being shaped by poetry written 3,000 years ago, which still retains its
wisdom and power. Thanks to my own days as a cathedral chorister, when I go to
visit someone in hospital, and they ask me to pray with them, I have an anthology
of prayers to draw on, which I carry in my memory. Because it so powerfully
conveys the ever-constant, never-to-be-escaped presence of God, psalm 139
comes often to mind:
O God thou hast searched me out and known me…..
The words of the liturgy - not just the psalms - shape our life of prayer (and this
aspect of public worship in relation to personal prayer is considered in chapter ?).
Liturgical prayer is ‘common’ prayer - something we have in common with others,
something that we share. For Anglicans the phrase common as in The Book of
Common Prayer, or its successor Common Worship is freighted with meaning.
Thomas Cranmer’s genius in conflating the monastic Hours into the the offices of
morning and evening prayer, in simplifying the rubrics and complexity of the
liturgy, and most of all in translating the prayers and Mass of the Latin Sarum Use
into memorable and beautiful English prose, created prayers that all could use
together - not just the priests but the ‘common’ people too. And because of this
common usage the prayers of the liturgy became part of the personal prayer of
individual Christians. They knew about penitence and praise and thanksgiving,
because week by week the liturgy gave them the words to express these emotions
in addressing God.
And the words of Cranmer in his Prayer Books inevitably shaped the prayer and
the poetry of the finest poets in the English language - as well as the prayer of
ordinary men and women. Cranmer was martyred under Mary Tudor in 1556 :
William Shakespeare was born in 1564. As Shakespeare was growing up in
Stratford-upon-Avon, having been baptised in the parish church there and
attending that church week by week, he too would have been shaped by prayer in
English crafted by Cranmer - even though his mother at least was brought up in
the old Catholic obedience. And although the King James version of the bible was
not authorised until 1611 (just a few years before Shakespeare’s death) he would
almost daily have absorbed the cadences of Tyndale’s bible in English which was
the forerunner of the 1611 version.
Not only Shakespeare, but John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan,
Thomas Traherne and John Milton and so many other poets from this golden age
of English letters were not just influenced but shaped by Cranmer’s prayers and
the Authorised Version of the bible, and their imagination was kindled and their
own words honed by the words and phrases of these formative texts. It is not
simply that Shakespeare for example refers in his plays to 42 books in the bible, or
that at a conservative tally he makes well over a thousand biblical references, it is
that the stories of the bible and the phrases of the prayer book stirred up an
imaginative stream in the literary consciousness of generations of writers - in the
way that Greek and Roman myths and legends had done in the past.
But the traffic is not all one way. Many books have been written on the influence
of the prayer book and King James Version on the literary culture of Britain (not
just England) in the seventeenth and succeeding centuries. But it worked the other
way as well. Our prayer has been illuminated, extended deepened and made vivid
by poets, novelists and playwrights. And the quality they bring to our spiritual
awareness is that of imagination. And it’s this quality of imagination I most want
to talk about in relation to prayer.
In the following talks I shall be discussing music and painting in relation to prayer
and our final session will be devoted to prayer and silence, and today’s talk
concerns the imaginative power of words. Of course the Word is a two edged
sword. Words I want to suggest can release and stimulate the imagination. But very
often words are used (especially in a religious context) to stifle imagination. And as
we shall see religiously motivated authorities have burned books, destroyed
paintings and statuary, and circumscribed the potential of musicians precisely
because they, following in the steps of no less an authority than St Augustine of
Hippo, have been wary of the power of the imagination.
Words of course have often been used in religious contexts to define, pin down,
control and prescribe. The Word of God - made flesh and dwelling among us -
has been released into our midst for us to cradle and nourish and be nourished by.
And what does ‘poor, little, talkative Christianity’ do? It overwhelms the Word of
God with its own more important, hectoring, moralising words. And the bible, for
example, which should be for us, as it was for Shakespeare and generations of
English poets, a source of inspiration, profound wisdom and a clue to how we
might live life in preparation for heaven - the bible has become all too often a
series of moralising slogans - captured by words ; not released by The Word.
Often it is our creative artists, whether they share our faith or not, who in their
pursuit of truth, in their vision of our humanity and our world as it is and as it
might be, reveal our faith to us again, with freshness and new insight and
challenge. Their own imagination has been kindled in their pursuit of ‘whatever is
true, honourable, just and pure; by whatever is lovely and commendable’ (Phil 4,8)
and they in their turn have through their artistry and truthfulness kindled our
imagination - and so helped us to pray.
In developing this theme and supporting the thesis I have proposed I could begin
with the novels of Iris Murdoch or Barbara Kingsolver; or the plays of Peter
Schaffer or David Hare; or the work of any number of poets and past and present
to illustrate my point - that if we want to enter more deeply into the spiritual
experience, indeed if we want to learn anything at all beyond the surface of
religious knowledge then our imagination needs to be kindled. And sometimes
words (despite their limitations to which I have alluded) in the hands of an
imaginative intelligence can do just that. The imagination, clarifying the vision of
the creative artist, both precipitates us into the world as it is, and at the same time
reveals to us something we never knew, or had never seen or heard before, or had
never recognised or acknowledged. And at the same time the creative artist
provides us with somewhere to stand, to observe and absorb these two aspects of
creative dialectic - of seeing the world as it is and as it might be. That is what the
imagination contributes to our human consciousness and therefore to our spiritual
awareness. and more specifically to our life of prayer. The artist gives us
somewhere to sit or stand or kneel - in a place often of wonder - where we can
contemplate the world as it is and as it might be.
And God? Where is God in that process of revelation. Sometimes the divine is
specifically invoked - and the biblical narrative and the grammar of Christian
spirituality continues to provide the vocabulary even for the most secular of
creative commentators. But as we shall see the divine is not always invoked - or at
least not directly. Not all art is good of course, and not all art is truthful. But the
imagination of the great creative artists - whatever their medium and despite (or
because of) the inevitable flaws in their work - is leading us into truth. And I find
great encouragement in the words of the great twentieth century spiritual writer,
Simone Weil who wrote:
It seemed to me certain that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure
regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to himself, because before being Christ, he is
truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into
his arms.
So with Simone Weil’s authority let us look at three poems which might lead us
into the world of imagination. The first poem is by the early seventeenth century
priest poet George Herbert, who turned his back on a promising academic career
at Cambridge, where he was public orator and who also spurned a glittering life at
court, despite his aristocratic credentials. He preferred to take the parson’s gown
and for three short years, until his death in 1633, became the priest of Fugglestone
with Bemerton just beyond Salisbury, where he wrote most of the poems for
which he is justly renowned. This poem is appropriately called Prayer.
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
The poem ends with the phrase ‘Something understood’ in a typical Herbertian
resolution, as though we have arrived somewhere - though what has been
understood is never quite made clear! I described my early approach to saying
prayers as ‘a shopping list’. What Herbert offers us here is a shopping list, rather
like my juvenile prayers. Perhaps that is the point. Herbert’s poem is a list of things
that come to Herbert’s mind as he scans the world around him. There are, as you
might expect in a poem entitled prayer, some religious references - references to
the passion for example as he relates prayer to the intercession that Christ offers
on the cross: ‘Christ side-piercing spear’ with its typical Herbertian ambiguity and
condensing of ideas in a well-turned phrase. For the spear that pierced Christ’s
side recounted in St John’s gospel, brought forth blood and water - often
interpreted as divinity and humanity flowing together from the blood stream of
the dying Christ. Prayer releases that saving stream. But prayer is also the spear
that causes Christ’s dying agony. As though prayer, our prayer is caught up in the
world’s sin as well as its redemption.
I could take every phrase in this finely wrought sonnet and subject it to that close
analysis and so many ideas pour forth. Take ‘exalted manna’ for example - a
somewhat subversive phrase since it is a reference to the eucharistic host for which
manna (referred to in the Book of Exodus as food for God’s people) provides the
original type. But here it is also referencing the host raised (exalted) by the priest at
communion - or would have been raised by the priest until the Cranmerian
restrictions on the appropriate manual acts performed by the priest during the
celebration of the sacrament were imposed. The poet scans the horizon of the
rapidly expanding known universe ‘the milky way’, ‘the land of spices’, ‘church
bells beyond the stars’, - as though prayer might provide the connection between
earth and heaven, feed our deepest needs and sustain our journey through life:
‘soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’
and there is a moment in the poem where the jumble and clamour of competing
images finds some repose:
‘softness and peace and joy and love and bliss’
This poem is beautifully metrical, rhythmical and rhymed in the most English of
ordered verse forms - the sonnet. But for all its order and meticulous crafting and
deeper meanings, it is a shopping list. And it is intended to be, reminding us of St
Paul when he talks of prayer:
The Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit
himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words, making sense of our incoherent
groanings’ (Romans 8 v26)
It would be going too far to describe George Herbert’s Prayer as incoherent
groanings, but is he justified in ending his sonnet with the words ‘something
understood’? It is a shopping list after all - however well-crafted.
It is also the only poem I know in the English language that does not have a main
verb. And maybe that is Herbert’s point. This is a poem about prayer without a
main verb. As though the poet’s prayer - though the poet is himself the user of
words par excellence - is waiting for the verb to be supplied to make sense of the
shopping list. The verbum (Latin for the Word) the Word of God, made flesh and
dwelling among us, is the one thing needed to make sense of our inarticulate
groaning. That is why George Herbert can end his poem with the phrase
‘Something understood’. The penny has dropped.
This poem is not a prayer - despite its title (though many Herbert poems can be
used as prayers). But by the carefully contrived incompleteness of his sonnet, by
the myriad of images drawn from all quarters of the known world, by the
imagination he expends himself and then evokes from the reader, by demanding
thought and engagement in deciphering his shopping list he illuminates the
process and substance of prayer itself. We find we have been taken beyond a
shopping list approach to prayer by this shopping list approach to prayer!
Some two hundred and fifty years after George Herbert another priest poet
emerged who, had his poetry been published in his lifetime, rather than thirty years
after his death in 1889, the whole course of English poetry in the twentieth
century might well have been very different. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit
priest who spent some years at the Jesuit house at St Beuno’s in North Wales near
St Asaph. there he wrote many of his most famous and beautiful poems, including
God’s Grandeur:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
If George Herbert looked out at the world of his day with all its
inventiveness and new discoveries, and religious tribulation and change,
Hopkins looked out on a world of enormous beauty and fragility - especially
in the Elwy Valley where he then lived - the beauty of which was being
destroyed, and whose fragility was being exploited by the advances of science
and rough-shod capitalism. And he relates both the creation of the natural
order and its nineteenth century desecration to the biblical myths of creation
and fall.
In the opening octet we have the vision of God’s creation - flaming, shining
shaking, gathering, oozing, crushed - described in a series of energetic verbs.
And against this vision of divine creativity is placed human pedestrianism,
conveyed in the repeated, ‘have trod, have trod, have trod.’ In contrast to the
life-creating range of the divine activity human kind is ‘seared’, ‘bleared’ and
‘smeared’, and smudge and smell describe the fallen condition of humanity.
And so desensitised have men and women become to God’s grandeur that we
cannot even feel the extent of our own destructiveness - ‘nor can foot feel
being shod’. This poem written in the late nineteenth century, and published
at the end of the Great War, is a poem for our own day when ecological
issues become ever more pressing.
As a work of creative imagination this beautifully crafted poem offers
insights into the world we inhabit with all its beauty and fragility, and also
reveals the human capacity to exploit and abuse the paradise we have been
given. And Hopkins relates this to the primeval human capacity to disobey
God’s will for us, from the beginning of time. But the sonnet doesn’t end
there. Hopkins sees the capacity of the natural world to revive and survive.
‘For all this, nature is never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep
down things’. He is describing nature in its daily re-awakening, as he watches
dawn break in the Elwy Valley. But through the description of nature he
follows the nature trail more deeply and finds God himself revealed. In the
final part of the poem the natural world is infused with a sense of the Holy
Trinity. If we have a picture - as we have already observed - of the creating
God, the Father, in the first eight lines, displaying his grandeur, then in this
last section we find the death and resurrection of Jesus re-awakening us to
new hope and the promise of paradise.
‘And though the last lights off the black west went’
is an almost uncanny premonition of Edward Gray’s words as he watched the
lamplighters from his rooms in Downing Street and recognised as the world
tumbled into war in 1914 ‘that the lights are going out all over Europe’. Here
Hopkins recognises the even greater event of Calvary and the death of Jesus
as the sun disappears in the west. And then the line
‘Oh, morning, at the brown brink, eastward springs’
is a reference both to the daily miracle of sun rise and to the Easter dawn of
the resurrection.
The final couplet
‘Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’
recognises that though this world is still a bent world, it is a redeemed world,
because the Holy Ghost broods over it. The Holy Ghost seen not simply in
traditional Christian iconography as a dove of peace, but as the hen who like
Jesus himself longs to gather her chicks to her, and further the warm breast
suggests the pelican in her piety who according to legend plucked her own
breast to feed her young - as Christ sacramentally feeds us, despite our
‘bentness’.
This again isn’t a prayer: it’s a poem. But it engages our intelligence, it kindles
our imagination, it gives us a place to sit or stand, to consider the poles of
our human predicament - the world as it is and the world as it might be, by
God’s grace. And the bright wings of this poem brings us to a place of
tranquility, a place of contemplation. When I read this poem I am brought to
a place of silence. That has a lot to do with prayer.
The third poem in this series of words that bring us to prayer is, like George
Herbert’s poem, called Prayer. Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate and was
made a DBE in the 2015 honours list. Despite being brought up as a Roman
Catholic and attending a Catholic school (maybe because of these
circumstances) she is not a Christian believer, but as is so often the case those
who do not believe or can’t cope with our religion with all its collusions and
compromises often reveal to us truths about our religion and the practice of
it that have either eluded us or we have chosen to ignore.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
This poem evokes for me rather nostalgically the sights and sounds of my childhood. If
this poem is about prayer as I believe it profoundly to be, then it locates prayer within
the ordinary, the places which ordinary people inhabit, with the smells, sights, sounds
and memories of every day life. The idea of a ‘sudden gift’ in the midst of the humdrum
as a woman lifts herself from despair and has a vision of something better and brighter
- that sudden gift is a feature of prayer, as is the painful truth (‘that small, familiar pain’)
we would sooner avoid. Then something as ordinary as a train passing recalls a halfforgotten
memory: evoking perhaps the certainties of liturgical prayer (‘distant Latin
chanting’) even while all else is in flux.
‘Pray for us now’… there in the middle of the poem, a sense that we can’t pray, and we
need the prayerful companionship of others, not least that of the saints. For this is a
fragment of prayer taken from the most used of Catholic prayers:
Hail Mary, full of grace….
Holy Mary Mother of God
pray for us now….and at the hour of our death.
Meanwhile life goes on around us providing the substance of our prayer through its
very humdrumness - listening to next door’s child rehearsing piano scales, or hearing
another child who is called in from playing - perhaps suggesting the adult who in the act
of calling his or her child’s name, is remembering their own lost childhood. And the
poem ends with that most ordinary of daily occurrences, the shipping forecast for
inshore waters - part of the prayerful regularity that the radio provides.
Darkness outside: inside the radio’s prayer.
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finnisterre
God isn’t mentioned in this poem. Perhaps this is a recognition that prayer doesn’t
necessarily or always spring from within a confession of faith, within a system of belief,
or within a community of believers (despite the pray for us now). Maybe prayer arises for
us all at a point of need, a moment of extremis, when our resources run out. As the
first of the Beatitudes puts it in the New English Bible, Blessed are those who know
their need of God. Out of our need prayer is uttered, whether we are believers or not -
and the God who knows our need before we ask responds to our incoherent
murmurings.
One final thing about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem. On first reading it I thought what a trite
way to end a poem - rhyming prayer with Finisterre. Until it dawned on me that Finisterre
does not just provide a convenient rhyme. Like ‘something understood’ it provides a
profound truth. That prayer, - needy and incoherent though it almost certainly will be,
and redolent of everyday, sights, sounds and smells - takes us to finis terre, to the ends of
the earth - and beyond. And maybe prayer takes us to the place where this chapter
began, to the Moslem Mohamedou in Guantanimo Bay, ‘praying in his heart’.
‘Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me’.
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