Contemplative Haven

gabrielle April 18th, 2008

In her book, “This War is the Passion” [1943], Caryll Houselander writes:  “The modern world has opposed poetry.  A mechanized world, a world of greed, a world at war, hard youth, art itself soulless and hard, all this is against poetry, the wonder of life.  Christ keeps poetry alive in the world, in its essence and in its outward form.  The Liturgy of the Church is the form in which Christ, God’s word of love, is sung continuously.  There is the rhythm of Christ, the Christ-voice, the continual utterance of the Word on earth.  Rhythm is not mere repetition.  It is the gathering of energy to the culmination of its own intensity.  It moves in a cycle, spending its life only in renewing it.  The rhythm of Christ is love moving on a circle of light from birth to death, from death to resurrection.” 

Many decades later, we find ourselves in an ever-more mechanized world, overwhelmed by technology, still filled with greed and war; but the cycle of life continues, and the wonder, the soul, is there for all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.  Christ’s poetry is ever-present - His rhythms, His cycles, His circle of Life.  Christ’s poets, in tune with His rhythms and cycles, with His very Life within them, restore our wonder, refresh our spirits, and replenish our souls. 

One such poet is fellow-blogger Ann, of Poetry, Prayer, and Praise.  Ann’s poetic gift is well-known to her readers, inspiring reflection, meditation, and the simple joy of soaking in the beauty of her imagery.  Much to our delight, Ann has recently published a book of her poetry entitled, “The Blueness Above:  Poetry, Prayer and Praise“.  All proceeds from the sale of her book are generously being donated to worthy causes, so from Ann’s poetry, we have blessings all around.  After months of reading Ann’s poems on her blog, I would be hard-pressed to choose a favourite, but let me leave you with a small sample (readers may see several of the included poems by clicking on the preview button at the Lulu site to which I have linked).
 
A Time for Praise

There is one God, 
One who loves and goes on loving
One whose love abounds.
He is here and near
As He once was yonder and hither,
He breathes life into the day
And warmth into the darkness.
His is the light that floods the heavens,
His strength is in the tides
And His mercy streams from age to age,
His is the voice of the bleating lamb,
The beauty of a hillside trapped in light,
The river in its rage;
There is a God
And now as ever is a time for praise.

[The second picture is Ann's back cover.]

• Happenings , Poetry
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gabrielle March 14th, 2008

The peace of great doors be for you.
Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs;
Wait for the great hinges.
The peace of great churches be for you,
Where the players of loft pipe-organs
Practise old lovely fragments, alone.

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

The peace of great prairies be for you.
Listen among windplayers in cornfields,
The wind learning over its oldest music.

The peace of great seas be for you.
Wait on a hook of land, a rock footing
For you, wait in the salt wash.

The peace of great mountains be for you,
The sleep and the eyesight of eagles,
Sheet mist shadows and the long look across.

The peace of great hearts be for you,
Valves of the blood of the sun,
Pumps of the strongest wants we cry.

The peace of great silhouettes be for you,
Shadow dancers alive in your blood now,
Alive and crying, “Let us out, let us out.”

The peace of great changes be for you.
Whispers, oh beginners in the hills.
Tumble, oh cubs - to-morrow belongs to you.

The peace of great loves be for you.
Rain, soak these roots; wind, shatter the dry rot.
Bars of sunlight, grips of the earth; hug these.

The peace of great ghosts be for you,
Phantoms of night-gray eyes, ready to go
To the fog-star dumps, to the fire-white doors.

Yes, the peace of great phantoms be for you,
Phantom iron men, mothers of bronze,
Keepers of the lean clean breeds.

• Poetry
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gabrielle March 7th, 2008

Not long ago I posted the words and music to Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song, If It Be Your Will, which touched our hearts in many different ways.  Recently I came across something closely related that I would like to share with you here.

In the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) archives, I found a series entitled, “Leonard Cohen:  Canada’s Melancholy Bard”.  Number Six in the series, “Cohen at 50″, is an archived radio broadcast from 1984, in which he is interviewed just after publication of his, “Book of Mercy”.  The whole interview is wonderful; about one-third of the way into it, spiritual mercy is the focus of the discussion.  Cohen describes what he simply refers to as a “wipe out”, but in the way he speaks of it, and of course, with “Book of Mercy” as the outcome, my feeling is that we are listening to him speak about something more akin to the dark night of the spirit rather than a burn-out.  Just to give you a little taste of the conversation (forgive me if I did not transcribe it perfectly - I hope you will listen for yourselves if you are interested in this topic) here is a bit of what Leonard says: 

Re the writing of the book:  “…where there’s no other form of expression possible… and you can’t speak, and the only thing you can say is a prayer, then this is the kind of work that follows.”

Re the experience he went through:  “…something like being stopped, something like walls, something like not being able to function in the way that you have been accustomed to, something like that.  Just the point where all the laws of necessity and relativity no longer make sense and you want to address the absolute source of things if you can locate it, and you try to locate it.” 

When the interviewer, Peter Gzowski , comments to Leonard that the book resulting from this experience is “not necessarily the work of a believer, this is not…a demonstration of faith or conviction, is it?”, Leonard responds:

“Those kinds of questions - I believe or I don’t believe - those belong to the mind, and, appropriately to the mind…but…when you find yourself in that landscape where the only thing you can do is prayer, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not, because you’re not using that faculty that evaluates the reality of faith or the reality of God or not - it’s a completely different landscape; it is a cry, and there is an object of the cry, and it’s a certainty in that place.”

“One is not interested in proving or not proving the existence of the object; if you address yourself to the source of mercy, you might have the good luck to discover that there is a source of mercy… There is a source of mercy as I experienced it, and these poems are the document of that address and that kind of deliverance.”

Leonard Cohen’s, “Book of Mercy” is a collection of fifty psalms.  I do not have the book myself, but here are two of the psalms that I found online: 

Number 1:
I stopped to listen, but he did not come.
I began again with a sense of loss.
As this sense deepened I heard him again.
I stopped stopping and I stopped starting,
and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.
This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all.
Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode.
I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love.
I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields.
Haltingly he moves toward his throne.
Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing.
In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked,
the court is established on beams of golden symmetry,
and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs,
born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

Number 50:
I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name.
The raw heart beat against the world,
and the tears were for my lost victory.
But you are here. You have always been here.
The world is all forgetting,
and the heart is a rage of directions,
but your name unifies the heart,
and the world is lifted into its place.
Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.

• Canadian , Divine Mercy , Poetry , Prayer
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gabrielle November 7th, 2007

The Falling Leaves (Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Canadian Poet, 1860-1943)

Lightly He blows, and at His breath they fall,
The perishing kindreds of the leaves; they drift,
Spent flames of scarlet, gold aerial,
Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift.
Lightly He blows, and countless as the falling
Of snow by night upon a solemn sea,
The ages circle down beyond recalling
To strew the hollows of Eternity.
He sees them drifting through the spaces dim.
And leaves and ages are as one to Him.

Why do Ye Call the Poet Lonely (Archibald Lampman, Canadian Poet, 1861-1899)

Why do ye call the poet lonely,
Because he dreams in lonely places?
He is not desolate, but only
Sees, where ye cannot, hidden faces.

• Poetry
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