Simon's Blog

Poems & Prayers for Lent 4
Yet another for Ash Wednesday.

At CSBC we are having a service for Ash Wednesday. Though we Baptists are not known for acknowledging days like this, we’ve embraced it as a way to prepare ourselves together for following Jesus to the cross. To be honest, we know it’s an arduous journey and we need all the help we can get!

It was these words of Walter Brueggeman, the Old Testament scholar, which a few years back first wetted my appetite for a more serious engagement with the tradition. And I am grateful.

Marked by Ashes
by Walter Brueggeman

Ruler of the Night,
Guarantor of the day . . . This day — a gift from you. This day — like none other you have ever given,
or we have ever received. 
This Wednesday dazzles us with gift
and newness and possibility. 
This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day,
for we are already halfway home halfway back to committees and memos, halfway back to calls and appointments, halfway on to next Sunday, halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant, half turned toward you,
half rather not.

This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday, but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes — we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth: of failed hope and broken promises, of forgotten children and frightened women, we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust; we can taste our mortality
as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with some confidence,
only because our every Wednesday of ashes anticipates your Easter victory
over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you
—you Easter parade of newness. Before the sun sets,
take our Wednesday and Easter us, Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom; Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth. 
Come here and Easter our Wednesday
with mercy and justice and peace and generosity.

We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.
Poems & Prayers for Lent 3
Another poem for Ash Wednesday

Surely in the brow’s sweat we seek the good,
a jewel desired but in harm’s setting placed.
Gained at a risk, our lives on danger based,
a chasm ’twixt what’s done and what we should;
Hurt and help are in the single circumstance
and evil taints the hope, the goal contaminates.
So Providence submits to bitter fate -
the cross; its partner in redemption’s dance.
Good comes by increments; so slow its speed!
Humanity rebuffs the pure, God’s Self!
Gives up! The good is placed back on the shelf
Two steps ahead, two back, progress indeed!
Try again! Smudge the tiny ash of grace;
God helps you make the world a better place!

Fr Harold MacDonald, 2004.
Poems & Prayers for Lent 2
I know. It ain’t Lent yet! But with Ash Wednesday loitering just around the corner and so many words written for it, I need to get in early.

Though I didn’t grow up in a tradition that marked Ash Wednesday, I like what it’s about. At the very beginning of Lent it leads us into the desert where Jesus fasted, prayed and battled with temptation just prior to the start of his ministry. Obviously what happened there for Jesus was key to his resolve and determination in the rest of the story.

Historically, deserts have been important places for spiritual growth. With distractions and props cleared away, desert journeys have a way of stripping human life down to its bare essentials, reminding us of our mortality, confronting us with our fears and failings, and highlighting our dependence on resources far beyond our own capacity.

It’s this sense of Ash Wednesday and its call to the desert that William Loader captures with this prayer.

A Prayer for Ash Wednesday 
The darkness asks us questions. You are out there and we do not see. You invite us into the night, the stillness, the loneliness, the desert place.

We cannot see our shadow; the cold damp of unknowing rises up from beneath our feet. We tread cautiously, tentatively.

We are afraid, afraid of ghosts haunting us with spectres of guilt and shame.

We would like to run back, reach the river bank, swim the Jordan, sit in the sun by the sea, mending our nets. But you have brought us here - with no bread.

When we look we can see only ourselves, our darkness. When we read, it is invisible words which cannot be grasped, thoughts we cannot clutch, hope we cannot capture.

Yet the wild honey remains a taste in our mouth, a memory for a new day.

Why have you brought us here? What miracle will you perform for us?

The darkness sighs around us, dense with your unseen presence, close to our breathing, close to our breathing.

O darkness, enlighten us, embrace us with your invisible love. Let us see your glory in the ashes. Take us by the hand that we may trust the darkness. Minister to us by your Spirit that we may not be afraid. 
Jesus, keep the beasts away.

Amen

William R. G. Loader, Emeritus Professor of New Testament, Murdoch University, (1999).
Poems & Prayers for Lent 1
Ok, so my Songs for Advent list is looking a bit frayed. ‘Get with the program!’ my beloved church secretary chided me. She’s right ... as always. It’s almost Lent and I’m still humming ‘Silent Night’. Trouble is, and let’s be honest, the music of Lent is much harder work---beautiful, powerful, heart wrenching---but hard for my heart to cope with. Appropriately so I suppose. After all, we’re headed for the cross.

So, for this Lenten season I’ve decided to go for poetry instead. No doubt, beautifully constructed words move me, and often deeply. Poetry has a power all of its own. So I’m not letting myself off the hook altogether, but choosing a bit of space to feel things more slowly.

The first comes from the Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman R.S. Thomas. He passed away in 2000 at the grand age of 87. That’s him in the picture above looking every bit the cantankerous Welshman that he was. But in the midst of his moodiness, he penned words that connected with people and lifted their vision.

As I prepare for this season of Lent, anticipating the bidding of Christ to follow through some of the most difficult territory of discipleship, Thomas’s words remind me too of God’s anticipation, of what God knew was to come.

And God held in his hand
a small globe.
Look, he said.
The son looked.
Far off, as through water,
he saw a scorched land
of fierce colour.
The light burned there;
crusted buildings
cast their shadows:
a bright serpent,
a river uncoiled itself,
radiant with slime.

On a bare hill a bare tree
saddened the sky.
Many people held out
their thin arms to it,
as though waiting
for a vanished April
to return to its crossed boughs.
The son watched them.
Let me go there, he said.
songs for Advent 6
Technically, I suppose, this one doesn’t rate as an Advent song. Still, it is the most beautifully truthful song I have heard this Advent season.

If I’m honest, my own confident professions of God’s imminence--the ones preachers make as routinely as breakfast--don’t always match the reality of my heart. Amidst my own frailty and that of others, I look just as awkwardly as everyone else for a glimpse of something holy, something angelic, something star-like to make love’s birth more immediate.

But then today, while waiting for the lift, I stared at an infant asleep in a stroller, her bare feet curled together, small and perfectly formed. Moments later, alone, I recognised holiness and it took my breath away.

There is something about this coming of God in a child that changes the view, that interrupts the horizon, that invades the most ordinary and routine places of life ... forever. Everything is holy now. Everything.

Peter Mayer’s ‘Holy Now’ may not make the Christmas carol list on Sunday, but it’s a gift to me.

‘When holy water was rare at best
I barely wet my fingertips
but now I have to hold my breath
It’s like I’m swimming in a sea of it

It used to be a world half there
heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
Now I’m walking with a reverent air
‘cause everything is holy now’
songs for Advent 5
I passed a shop window today with an image of the infant Jesus posted behind a display of cosmetics. Not one for lipstick or facial cleansers, I didn’t notice much about what was on offer but I was taken with the image. Jesus had the complexion of an Islander from the South Pacific, was wrapped in a crocheted Chilean blanket, and was held in the black arms of an African mother.

When I came home I saw Milton’s link to JT’s ‘Some children see him’ and felt quite moved by it. So here it is, # 5 on the list:
songs for Advent 4
I know. Including a song by an atheist in my Advent list is a bit left field. It could even be annoying. But this is my list so it’s in. The song is Tim Minhin’s ‘White Wine in the Sun’.

I like it for two reasons.

First, it’s honest. And that’s a trait I find increasingly attractive. After the week I’ve had, I reckon some honest disbelief outshines a pile of religious posturing, point scoring and bigotry any day. But that’s another matter. Really though, I reckon Minchin’s words probably tap into what lots of people feel this time of year, not just card-carrying non-believers. While there’s something about the Christmas story that resonates, even touches the heart, the institutional and commercial trappings that surround it create more scepticism than belief.

Second, Minchin’s song celebrates something about the Christmas story that’s well worth a song or two: family, identity, belonging. Sure, it’s not the whole truth, but it’s truth no less. And it’s evidence too of the spirituality—the deeper longings and values—that inhabits the average religious/agnostic/atheist heart. That’s good, isn’t it?

I’m really not up for telling the world how vacuous and empty its celebration of Christmas is. Sure, it might be shallow and poorly informed—just like my own—but that doesn’t render it illegitimate. I reckon what people find in the Christmas season—the affirmation of life, the celebration of community and good will—is worth cheering for. Otherwise we become like religious Scrooges who do nothing but turn the lip at the tinsel and good cheer. And what good does that do anyone? I’d rather sit in the sun with white wine, my family and my neighbours, and be quietly grateful for the life that is ours through God’s grace ... that grace expressed so magnificently and openly in Jesus.

So here it is:
songs for Advent 3
To be honest, I’ve never known what to do with Mary. Her life experience is so far removed from my own that I’d feel fraudulent suggesting I know anything beyond ‘the mother of Jesus.‘ And when I listen to the most popular retellings of Jesus’ birth story I’m none the wiser. It seems to me like Mary is either deified beyond all recognition or is merely a bit player in an epic drama that surpasses her completely and leaves her eternally silent.

The only glimpse of ‘truth’ I’ve ever come across to push me a little closer to this enigmatic woman came from a song I heard for the first time last Advent. It’s Patty Griffin’s ‘Mary’. My on-line friend Milton posted it in his own ‘music for Advent‘ collection and I was transfixed from beginning to end.

What I find compelling is the picture it paints of the relationship between Jesus and his mother, one that began in a manger but grew far beyond it. I still don’t have a clue as to what that relationship was like. But what this song hints at so gently is the unique but mysterious role a mother plays in a child’s life, no matter who that child is or becomes.

‘Jesus said, “mother I couldn’t stay another day longer.”
He flies right by and leaves a kiss upon her face.
And while the angels are singing praises in a blaze of glory,
Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place.’

Girffin’s song provides such a human glimpse of Mary, neither deified nor marginalised. Her role in Jesus’ life did not stop in the manger and neither was her love defined by it. Ever in the background, her finger prints were and still are on every page of her child’s story. Deification is completely unnecessary. Who she was is sacred enough.