Parish Priest's Desk Archive Jan to June 2010
January 3
I will be away most of January, holidaying and spending time at Douglas Park on retreat. As this goes to press there is still no final decision made in regard to a replacement for Mark Hanns. During January I thought I might offer you some of my favourite poems. I hope ypu enjoy them.
John Donne Divine Meditations 14
‘Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but nock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste except you ravish me’ (Holy Sonnets v).
January 10
From the Sufi Rumi Writings:
‘The intellectual quest is exquisite, like pearls and coral
but it is not the same as the spiritual quest.
The spiritual quest is on another level altogether.
Spiritual wine has a subtler taste.
The intellect and the senses investigate cause and effect.
The spiritual seeker surrenders to wonder.’
January 17
A. D. Hope Australia
A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars
Darkens her hills, those endless outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie;
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drawn among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not ‘we live’ but ‘we survive’,
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like live teeming sores
Each drains her, a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, is still from the desert the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
January 24
Mary Oliver ‘Gethsemane’
The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me.
And maybe the stars did,
Maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
Maybe the lake far away,
where once he walked as on a blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.
January 31
John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead thou me on.
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou
Shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.
