Musings on a Monday

Monday 11^th December

A chilly, wet, windy Monday morning, with a pile of laundry to do. After three years without one, I am so glad for our tumble dryer! The William and Shadow braved the elements and had a short walk to the village recycling bins with our bag of plastic, tin, and glass, and the birds are being blown to and fro as they peck at the fat balls and sunflower seeds on the feeder. The William then becomes busy putting up more pictures, including my huge image of a Buddha, and a prayer image given to William by his friend Sarah, given to her by a monk during her trekking holiday in Nepal, wearing William's his extreme cold weather gear. I make a Chinese-style mushroom soup (which turns out a bit too chillie-fied!) and baked spiced oranges and figs drizzled with maple syrup & topped with toasted pecans, which are yummy.

I have begun my annual re-reading of Rosamunde Pilcher's marvellous novel 'Winter Solstice' and this wintry day has put me in mind of the opening of one of my favourite poems: 'Midwinter spring is its own season, sempiternal, though sodden towards sundown'. It's certainly sodden here! The poem is 'Little Gidding' by T.S.Eliot, one of his Four Quartets, first published in 1945.

Forty years ago (really? how can it be so long?) I went with my friend and former university chaplain John Cooke to visit Little Gidding, which is a village about 30 miles from Cambridge. Back in 1626 Nicholas Ferrar and his family founded a lay religious community, the Community of Christ the Sower, there, based on adherence to Christian worship according to the Book of Common Prayer and the Catholic heritage of the Church of England. That original community existed for about thirty years, and although it was denounced by Puritans as Arminian heresy, it attracted visitors, including King Charles I, who, having been there twice previously, sought refuge with the community after the Royalist defeat at the Battle of Naseby.

In the mid 19^th century, at around the time of the Catholic Revival, or Oxford Movement, Little Gidding featured in a popular historical novel 'John Inglesant' by Joseph Henry Shorthouse, and interest in the Little Gidding Community revived.

Alan Maycock founded The Society of the Friends of Little Gidding in 1946, with the support of T.S.Eliot who had visited in 1936 and whose 'Four Quartets' had just been published. There is more about Alan Maycock here, with a moving recollection by his widow Enid:

http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/lgchtmlfiles/lgpeople5maycocks.html

From the 1970s – the time when John and I visited – until 1998 it was home to a new Community of Christ the Sower, led by Robert van der Weyer, and based in the former farmhouse and adjacent buildings. I remember the rather chilly chapel and sleeping on a camp bed in the dormitory-style accommodation over the barn!

Below are extracts of Eliot's poem, and there's more information (well worth a look) about Ferrar and the present day Community of Christ the Sower (who still use the Little Gidding Prayer book that Robert authored) now based at St. Mary Magdalene's Retreat in Yreka, California:

http://www.stmarymagdalenes.org/christthesower.htm

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

If you came this way,

Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city -
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid...

Of weather and poetry...

After a day or so of rain, today dawned clear and bright, and I've spent a lovely morning in the garden, hacking back the ronces (brambles) and bracken at the southern end where we plan to create a small parking place and entrance into what will, eventually, become our little orchard.

I do enjoy being out in the fresh air, although it's also great to come back into a warm house, with our new stove now in situ and working well. I've had to forgo my intention to continue gardening this afternoon however: taking Shadow for his main walk after lunch we were caught in a hail storm, speckling his coat with white ice dots. I know I was reading Shelley's poem 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit' this morning, but not that sort of hail! :-) But even the hail storm was off-set by a full rainbow arching against the dark sky.

Being part of such a beautiful landscape, with its rolling hills, huge skies, morning mists, and ever-changing clouds, made me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 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 warn breast and with ah! bright wings.

I'm a big fan of Manley Hopkins, although these days he wouldn't get away with his use of the words 'men' and 'man' to mean people: but of course he was writing according to the customs of his own time, and the slightly jarring off-notes they create are vastly off-set by the genius of his imagery.

I think I first became consciously aware of such linguist niceties and changing social & theological  mores back in the 80s, and, while training for the ministry, particularly valued the work of a fellow URC minister and writer Brian Wren. His book 'What language shall I borrow' counter-balanced, for me, the stridency of feminist theology at the time. I have been very happy to include his great hymn 'Bring Many Names' in various acts of worship, and his poem/hymn 'Who Is She' captures the heart of what I am only now beginning to study in greater depth.

Who is She, neither male nor female, 

maker of all things, only glimpsed or hinted, 

source of life and gender?

She is God, mother, sister, lover:

in her love we wake, move and grow, are daunted, 

triumph and surrender.

Who is She, mothering her people, 

teaching them to walk, lifting weary toddlers, 

bending down to feed them?

She is Love, crying in a stable, 

teaching from a boat, friendly with the lepers, 

bound for crucifixion.

Who is She, sparkle in the rapids,

coolness of the well, living power of Jesus

flowing from the scriptures?

She is Life, water, wind and laughter,

calm, yet never still, swiftly moving Spirit,

singing in the changes.

Why is She, mother of all nature,

dying to give birth, gasping yet exulting

to a new creation?

She is Hope, never tired of loving,

filling all with worth, glad of our achieving, 

lifting all to freedom.