Mary’s song

Mary’s Song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest…
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigour hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so light it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
Luci Shaw

(with thanks to Peter Muir who drew this to my attention.)

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall

One night when the November wind

has flayed the trees to bone, and earth

wakes choking on the mould,

the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost

One morning when the shrinking earth

opens on mist, to find itself

arrested in the net

of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark,

One evening when the bursting red

December sun draws up the sheet

and penny-masks its eye to yield

the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,

will come like crying in the night,

like blood, like breaking,

as the earth writhes to toss him free.

He will come like child.

Rowan Williams, (The Collected Poems, 2002)

We suspect angels

We suspect angels

And disbelieve good news

Ah God, who will save us?

Our cynicism is the fruit of our experience

Not the key to the future

Our suspiciousness helps us to smell the rat

Never to recognise the dove.

Our perfect analysis may describe the mountain

But it is powerless to move it.

It is with little pride we must confess:

We suspect angels

And disbelieve good news.

As Christmas approaches,

Give us a share of that divine naivete

Enjoyed by Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph

And unnamed country folk,

Who encountered angels,

And believed Good News

And recognised Christ coming among them.

Amen

from Cloth for the Cradle, , WGRG, Iona Community

The Annunciation

The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sounds perpetual roundabout
rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

but through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
but stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break

Edwin Muir 1887-1959

Mary’s baby

This poem originally appeared here, where you can read the circumstances in which it was written.

It is time. From deep within
my inner dark a sudden
fierce tightening calls out.
Be still, I say. Be quiet.
This child will come
will find the light
will be the light
new in my life, but now
I want to keep him close
keep him mine alone.

A huge force squeezes me again
taking me beyond the lighted space
into the dark of inwardness
focussed only on the pain
forgetting self and any joy
to come from such gigantic toil.
Someone cries inside my head
and anxious faces swim and fade
and leave my eyes alone to look
and marvel at a miracle
as something infinitely huge and small
is born, and lifted to my arms.

My heart is broken and remade.

My son looks up. His black eyes gaze
on heaven one last lingering time
before they close against my breast.
We are alone, and all the world
shrinks to a tiny, distant speck
as swelling joy fills all my soul.

I hold him close. My son is born.

©C.M.M. 28/11/08

Advent Prose revisited

Rend the heavens, come quickly down –
Can we mean it? In the dark
to ask the God to come like this
would have us tremble at the presence
sought that Sunday as we sang.
Behold, thou wast angry and we sinned –
dear God, we try, we know our sin,
we see too clearly where we are.
The veiled women weep, the bomb
explodes on distant soil:
we worry lest our own are there,
care less about the ruined lives
among the debris of our wars.
All our deeds are like a polluted garment –
hung about us in the cold
as if we fear our nakedness,
would do anything to hide.
The child dies at the hands of those
whose task is care and love
while we, appalled, avert our eyes
from innocence betrayed.
We all fade like a leaf
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away –
light little things in the face of creation
and yet, and yet …
Lord, we continue. You have never
swept us from the face of earth.
We love and beget and children
lovely children, innocent and clean
come naked into the world
in your eternal promise of what can be.
Your Son will come, again, again
and we have hope, another chance
to use your world in precious ways
to hold your people to your face.
As tiny fingers clasp round ours
we reach into the dark and feel
the strength of love enfolding us.
The heavens are rent as if a cloud
were parted at the end of rain
and light will come too bright to tell –
we sing again. Come, Lord, and soon.

©C.M.M

Anticipation….of customer service

I know how the Inn Keeper felt, letting Joseph and Mary down by telling them there was no rooms free for the mother in anticipation.
Working in Customer Services for the past 3 Christmas’ I have become accustomed to letting people down gently.
“I’m sorry your delivery will be late”
“I’m sorry your turkey smelled off when you went to cook it on Christmas eve”

As Christmas draws closer, and especially as it become more commercial year on year, I pray for greater “Goodwill among all men” I think it’s the only thing that might keep me sane.

Continually one prayer comes to mind, attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

The Serenity Prayer:

O God and Heavenly Father,

Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed;
the courage to change that which can be changed,
and the wisdom to know the one from the other,
through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen