The Light is very near the Darkness. Job 17 v12
To the God of the slave
The harbour of the forgotten soul
who is found in the twilight of confusion -
The cries of the poor burn your ears
and awaken the lights of your justice.
May we walk the restless path,
Out of the hubric darkness of the rich
And into the liberation of the humiliation of crucifixion.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged crucifixion, Job, liberation, Prayer, religion, spirituality
Thumbing through Greene and O’Connor’s Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry (AD 600 to 1200) I came across this short hymn that I thought I would share. Night prayer has never been an easy practice for me being a morning person and by nature lazy. Yet this seemed to me to be most fitting to recite at the end of the day.
These words build a bridge and offer a way for us to rediscover the diversity of our fellow travelers, both human and angelic. I know I cannot bridge the gap alone and of course understand that the Divine Grace bled for me from the cross is all-sufficient. Yet this western privatisation of salvation, into a ‘me centred’ doctrine, leaves me feeling lonely. I am not sure we were meant to climb the mountain alone. I am reminded of the psalmist declaration;
He will command his angels concerning you,
To guard you in all your ways.
Upon their hands they will lift you up,
So your foot will not strike itself against a stone.
Anyway the Hymn;
Archangel St Michael
Angel! great miracled Michael,
Carry my request to the Lord.
Do you hear me?
Ask of the forgiving God forgiveness for all my great evil.
Do not delay!
Carry my greedy request to the King, to the High King.
Bring help,
Bring protection to my soul in its hour of leaving earth.
To meet my waiting soul come stoutly with many thousands of angels.
Warrior, against the crooked, twisted, warring world come to my help indeed.
Do not spurn what I say, do not desert me while I live!
I choose you to redeem my mind, my sense, my body.
Intercessor, victorious fighter, angelic slayer of the Antichrist!
Mael ĺsu Ó Brolchán
Posted in Personal Journal, Poetry
Tagged Archangel St Michael, fellow travelers, golden treasury, irish poetry, night prayer
Thomas Merton in his book ‘The Silent Life’ refers to a person who does not find any silence in their life as;
‘No longer being moved from within, but only from outside himself. He no longer makes decisions for himself, he lets them be made for him’.
I read this back in November and was struck by the resonance of these words and there relevance to my own life. My own story being one of discovering the internal journey is the greatest challenge I face as a man. I have come to talk of the internal and external worlds; one being the true journey explored in the silence before God, the other being the echo in the material world.
Through out December in the lead up to Christmas, I choose to listen as I prayed each morning. I found a strange mixture of companions in my early mornings that made me realise I am never alone.
Decembers Companions.
Cold stone and winter breath,
Reflect the waning moon and platinum frost
A chorus of partridge, pheasant
Handsome blackbird and melodious thrush
with robin and rook – sing the psalmists ancient flood*
Creations song, their instinctive blood.
Strong earth soaks in red mornings yawn,
With altar and candle paints
Tears of affection at creations fiery dawn,
The mighty angels and my friendly saints
Micheal’s strong arm and Patrick’s shield,
Columba’s command to be alone
Calls the white doe to dance upon the winter field
In ebbing darkness and moorland snow.
*Psalm 63
The richness of Gods voice I have found is in the solitude and silence, through which we create a sonnet of creations true nature.
Following on from my reflections on The Feast of the Holy Innocents, I am posting this poem, as I recall two friends who have graced my life and who had their innocence ripped from them and the consequences they have to now live with.
My first friend was my lodger and was arrested on a suspected rape charge, was found guilty and remains in prison to this day. He was born in the north of England, his father committed suicide, his mother is an alcoholic, he was repeatedly molested and abused as as a child by an Anglican Priest. His brother is a ‘lifer’ for murder I believe, and he was abandoned in his mid teens. I met him when I was leading the youth work at my local Church. He was alcoholic, illiterate and violent, yet when challenged became open to the Gospel. He never stood a chance. Today he is a middle aged man, humbled by his past, grateful to God for forgiveness and confused by the dysfunctional and broken prison system that continues to incarcerates him despite beyond his tariff by three years.
My other friend I met in India, abandoned as a baby he grew up on the streets of Maharashtra. He does not know his birthday. He was adopted by an English couple, who brought him to the UK, where rather than sending him to school they used him as a domestic servant. After repeatedly running away, his legal parents flew him back to India and left him there. He became a street kid, got into drugs and eventually found his way to Sahara House, were he received rehabilitation. The Sahara lawyer and myself worked on getting him his UK citizenship where he now resides. Poor, unemployed, father of a child, he has struggled to reconcile his past to his present day. Dislocated, disenfranchised and disowned by everyone he is still bumping alone along the bottom. Just the other day we met again for the first time in many years, we walked, talked and in the quiet of a local chapel we prayed together.
Both men are broken but have not lost hope, even if it is the smallest candle held in the face of a raging storm.
He searches for the undiscovered country
Entrapped in a web of desire for escape
Beyond the knowledge of self and sense.
The siren of sexual seduction wooing him to yield to the inevitable
Turn of the tide, change of the season,
Those karmic rhythms of pagan philosophy,
Binding him to a temporary eternity
And the carnal curse of the immediate.
Even those great myths-
Gilgamesh, Arthur, Buddha, Mohammed
With all their history and shadow,
Songs and smells, their calls to prayer,
Their promise of rich opium in paradise
The erotic fantasy of pleasure for the faithful.
Nirvana – the Cobain oblivion of nothingness
And that path through the
Raging fires of chaos and hell – the dragons breath
Could subdue him to yield
To the anarchy of false prophecy.
He searches for truth
Beyond Jung the collective monist
Freud the great neurotic who has so damaged New York.
Beyond Kant and Descartes, the two dimensional philosophy
The great denial of the Great I AM.
He longs to move beyond
The conspiracy of co-caine and crack
That keeps the young on the hair–trigger of violence
Attempting to discover what they do not really want.
The victims of sophistication
Only brought with privilege and education.
Beyond natural pride,
That hole in the heart surgery of self-obsession
Of those sanctified in their rape.
Innocence lost, becomes
The rite of passage to adulthood –
The self-reliance of masturbation
The Eucharist of humanities individualisation.
Endless self-obsession, endless self-obsession
Endless contemplation of freedom
Being the fulfillment of his carnal needs.
He longs for a touch that holds nothing more than innocence.
Innocence what is that?
His birth, his death?
Did he walk Innocent Street once?
Does it have name?
Tir-nan-og, The Fallow Lands,
The Great Hunting Fields,
Elysium, Heaven
Heaven to him creates pain, the pain of not knowing perfection
For he yearns to be what he cannot be
For you cannot see God and live…
In the squeeze of his despair he sees
The gate of the Undiscovered Country-
Humility, Grace, Peace, Freedom.
He cannot escape this cross,
This horror, the horror, the fucking horror
Of living in the darkness of God.
All his roads, schemes, desire
Sins, perjuries lead to this place.
The horror of the innocent slain-
In every gas chamber, slum street
Prison cell, dying room, and battlefield.
In every adulterous hotel room, paedophile hostel,
Prostitute street corner, gay bar and fetish whipping post
The innocent are slain,
The INNOCENT is slain.
In the death that follows sin
Is the cry from the harrowed heart,
In the name of love his innocence was killed
In the name of love the INNOCENT was killed-
The undiscovered country discovered
In the INNOCENT that was slain.
April 2001
A quick link to a piece I wrote back in early September just after the riots. Like to know you thoughts…
