What a promise in that title! I have re-discovered an appreciation of poetry this past year. It has caused me to look at our hymns, songs and contemporary poetry in a new and critical light. My mother, Elizabeth Bell, in following a long life of family interest gave me the Lion (a British Publisher) Christian Poetry Collection. It is not a Hallmark – Helen Steinem-Rice meets Mr. Rogers kind of stuff, but quite profound.
Here is a miscellany for your reflection.
Christ as danger:
Salus Mundi
I saw a stable, low and very bare,
A little child in a manger.
The oxen knew him, had him in their care,
To men he was a stranger.
The safety of the world was lying there,
And the world’s danger.
Mary Coleridge, 1861-1907
A surprise from DH Lawrence which makes one wonder if it is autobiographical.
The Hands of God
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.
Did Lucifer fall through knowledge?
oh then, pity him, pity him that plunge!
Save me, O God, from falling into the ungodly knowledge
of myself as I am without God.
Let me never know, O God
let me never know what I am or should be
when I have fallen out of your hands, the hands of the living God.
That awful and sickening endless sinking, sinking
through the slow corruptive levels of disintegrative knowledge
when the self has fallen from the hands of God
and sinks, seething and sinking, corrupt
and sinking still, in depth after depth of disintegrative consciousness
sinking in the endless undoing, the awful katabolism into the abyss!
even of the soul, fallen from the hands of God!
Save me from that, O God!
Let me never know myself apart from the living God!
D.H. Lawrence 1885 – 1930
The balances, terrors, and ambiguity of life…
DUM, VIVIMUS, VIVAMUS
Live while you live, the Epicure would say
And seize the pleasures of the present day.
Live while you live, the sacred Preacher cries,
And give to God each moment as it flies.
Lord, in my view, let both united be,
I live in pleasure if I live to thee.
Philip Doddridge 1702-51
Finally, a different poem from the British Poet Laureate John Betjeman. It is from a sermon by David Morrison on his second to last Sunday at West Point Grey Baptist in Vancouver. The poem was given to him by Michelle Tittmap, a Regent student from Ulster.
The Commission of St. Paul.
[In 1955 Mrs Margaret Knight, a humanist, caused a sensation by her broadcasts on BBC radio attacking Christianity. This was composed in reply to her arguments, and it was published in The Listener of February 10, 1955]
Now is the time when we recall
The sharp Conversion of St. Paul.
Converted! Turned the wrong way round –
A man who seemed till then quite sound,
Keen on religion – very keen –
No-one, it seems, had ever been
So keen on persecuting those
Who said that Christ was God and chose to die for this absurd belief
As Christ had died beside the thief.
Then in a sudden blinding light
Paul knew that Christ was God all right –
And very promptly lost his sight.
Poor Paul! They led him by the hand
He who had been so high and grand
A helpless blunderer, fasting, waiting,
Three days inside himself debating
In physical blindness; ‘As it’s true
That Christ is God and died for you,
Remember all the things you did
To keep his gospel message hid.
Remember how you helped then even
To throw the stones that murdered Stephen.
And d you think that you are strong
Enough to own that you were wrong?’
They must have been an awful time,
Those three long days repenting crime
Till Ananias came and Paul
Received his sight, and more than ll
His former strength, and was baptised.
Saint Paul is often criticised
By modern people who’re annoyed
At his conversion, saying Freud
Explains it all. But they omit
The really vital point of it,
Which isn’t how it was achieved
But what it was that Paul believed.
He knew as certainly as we
Know you are you and I am me
That Christ was all he claimed to be.
What is conversion? Turning round
From chaos to a love profound.
And chaos too is an abyss
In which the only life is this.
Such a belief is quite all right.
If you are sure like Mrs. Knight
And think morality will do
For all the ills we’re subject to.
But raise your eyes and see with Paul
An explanation of it all.
Injustice, cancer’s cruel pain,
All suffering that seems in vain,
The vastness of the universe,
Creatures like centipedes and worse –
All part of an enormous plan
Which mortal eyes can never scan
And out of it came God to man.
Jesus is God and came to show
The world we live in here below
Is just an antechamber where
We for His Father’s house prepare.
What is conversion? Not at all
For me the experience of St. Paul,
No blinding light, a fitful glow
Is all the light of faith I know
Which sometimes goes completely out
And leaves me plunging round in doubt
Until I will myself to go
And worship in God’s house below –
My parish Church – and even there
I find distractions everywhere.
What is conversion? Turning round
To gaze upon a love profound.
For some of us see Jesus plain
And never once look back again,
And sme of us have seen and known
And turned and gone away alone,
Bur most of us turn slow ot see
The figure hanging on a tree
And stumble on and blindly grope
Upheld by intermittent hope.
God grant before we die we all
May see the light as did St. Paul.
Warmly,
In Christ
Jeremy Bell
*All poems (except the Conversion of St. Paul) copyright Lions Publication.