Advent: 18 December 2022
Good afternoon,
on the fourth Sunday in Advent, when a fourth candle was lit on advent wreaths in countless churches. Behind this window is the letter S, which could stand for stable, shepherds, strangers or the star. In fact, I’d like to share four short poems about all these by another S, the Scottish poet Kenneth Steven. His poetry is imbued with a deep Christian faith but it is a faith couched also in words of doubt and difficulty. Yet it seems to me he finds in stable, star and strangers a shimmering solace. I’ve arranged these poems as a sort of movement towards faith.
*
Make-Believe [from Evensong]
There is no God nowadays,
We have grown up and gone away from home.
There is no last prayer before the light goes out –
We lie awake and wonder, and the dark is sore.
Sometimes, in the flicker of the dawn,
When the garden blooms with a thatch of birdsong –
We feel the place that joys and hurts
Empty and waning.
Sometimes, in the suburban sadness of the last train going home –
Acres and acres of living rooms,
Flickering thin November rain –
We wish and know it’s all too late.
We must understand the murders of children alone now;
We must put back on an old shelf the donkey and stable
We made out of wood a long time ago –
We have to believe we were wrong.
We need to keep on going
And everything will be just fine.
Of course it will – it’s only a question of time,
Nothing more than a question of time.
*
Believing (from Evensong)
Winter and the geese circle the fields in hunching skeins,
Everything asleep and buried, secret,
Waiting for some silent voice to waken them once more.
There among the trees, low above the ground,
The sun struggles to break through,
Pale as a daffodil, frail and failing.
To keep believing is not easy, even in December
With the child’s clutter of star and donkey, gift and manger.
The dark comes back, the long dark
Searching lost through the fields. The night
Starless and empty, just rivers full of gibberish,
The morning hopeless, a grey sky low over a grey earth.
*
[from A Song Among the Stones]
two of them crouched
by a silver dance of river
sometimes faith is elusive
hard to catch as a fish
God is distant and brittle
as a star on the night’s edge
sometimes everything seems
desolate as a winter land
so what is left then
asked the youngest, turning
to remember this
said the one who brought them
a golden crook of lightning
fluttered from the sky
and lit a stable
*
The Strangers
When they arrived
everything was as it should have been:
the man was making something out of wood,
the girl slept. Sunlight danced with dust,
and the beasts shifted over on the side
that kept the shadow. The baby blinked the light
and did not cry. The storm had passed
and everything had fallen back to normal.
Only then the unintelligible words
and inexplicable gifts; the strange simplicity
of the mystery. The echo that was left behind
when the door closed and the dark came back.
If you have appreciated these, you may want to attend an online Winter Solstice poetry reading which Kenneth Steven is giving this Tuesday at 7 pm with AbbeyoftheArts.com. See https://abbeyofthearts.com/calendar/winter-solstice-poetry-reading/
S is also for Scotland’s Future. The Chaplaincy Prize has Scotland’s Future as its theme, and we look forward to student entries by 31 January. See https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/chaplaincy/chaplaincy-prize/ for details. If you’d like to know more about the prize, this year’s theme and the Chaplaincy generally, here is an interview I gave about it recently released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnCWkHF7DwY
And for S twice more, here is the Scores in snow on Friday morning.
Yours,
Donald.