For Adventia, day 3, we are graced by the always luminous words of Welsh Anglican bishop, poet, writer, theologian, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Adventia, day 2
In my first installment in this series, I explained the origins of my strange, made up word. “Adventia;” as I see it, a poetic foray into the headwaters of Advent – waiting, hoping, and preparing, together with Fragmentia, those literary illuminations of God’s in-breaking into our world to which we may unite the former.
For most of these we’re taking our cue from a favourite Instagram site of mine – #realpoetsdaily Today, we’re blessed by this gem by T. S. Eliot, excerpted from “The Four Quartets.”
Adventia, day 1
No, the above is not meant as some cheap attempt at a New Joizy accent with the word adventure. Let’s just call it the purposeful amalgamation of Advent and Fragmentia. Let it be a place where the illumination of God’s in-breaking into our world found in the Advent narratives unites with the fragments of literature and faith and life seeking to bring us to deeper understanding of it all.
Advent is upon us once more. With it comes a barrage of books and practices all aimed at helping us get the most from the experience. Last year I chose to post a daily poetic reflection on my poetry website. This year I’d like to do something similar here on innerwoven. It gives me opportunity to dive deep into some of the best words about the best time of the year; the beginning of the church’s calendar at Advent. These poems are both old and new and are found in various places.
For Advent, day 1 we begin with a gorgeous piece by Sally Thomas, which I saw first on a favourite Instagram channel, #realpoetsdaily
Here is “First Sunday” by Sally Thomas ( @sallytnnc )
Thank you, Mr. Lawrence
I have a new spiritual director. Her name is Lynn. She is a most perceptive lady, especially given how much I adore poetry. After our most recent spiritual direction session, she was compelled to send me this by way of follow up. Two things: find yourself an anam cara; a professional spiritual director or at least someone you trust to walk with you as you both walk with God. Secondly, look for the sacred in narrative and poetry. Next to creation and sacred writ, it is often the most meaningful manner by which the God of creation speaks to our souls.
So then, Lynn, thanks for listening so attentively.
Thank you, Mr. Lawrence for this poem which has always been a favourite.
Lord, thank you for both!
Seeds of Grace
I’ve been quite open about my struggle with alcoholism and subsequent recovery. Perhaps it is because, through my association with the program and community of A.A. I’ve rediscovered the loving, trustworthy God I once knew. That God somehow got lost along the way, despite my practices of faith, my role as a “professional Christian,” and a radical conversion experience at eighteen.
These days, my faith is simpler. It is not so cliché-ridden, expectation-laden, preconceived notions-driven. It is one of basics: learning humility, self-love, and the practices necessary to maintain and nourish the same. Along the way, I read everything I can get my hands on to assist in that journey. This is a short excerpt from my Seeds of Grace: A Nun’s Reflections on the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous by Sister Molly Monahan (pseudonym).
Where poets learn to see
Grey ash, dead-branch-dim
d
e
s
c
e
n
d
s
into corpses, exhumed-verse to still worse fate –
apathy.
Words, once ample-ripe, now winter-sparse,
hunt, cock-ear’d, lungs-flatten’d, for somewhere
to land, to inhale.
Dust-grey soundings lay coiled, like the end of a painter’s day,
wrestling out colours, lines, faces –
not bothered anymore with looking beyond what is seen.
Just the clamouring fool’s last-call for the quick and easy.
These
lazy
letters, unfinished sen
Like changing tires on rusted farm trucks mired in tired dirt,
we muck about in quicksand of distraction, disappointment, deadlock,
the oppressive weight of art.
As needful distraction, we gather up the prosaic, pretentious, polemical,
in fits of laughing stems knit to notes, clinging tight to daylight’s end.
Throats worn from croaking long-forgotten songs of drunken men and laughing children.
Why not dare, instead, to probe the unentered caves where live
the furies, the forbidden, the fortuitous?
That prodigious, crowing dark –
where poets learn to see.
The scars of our days
We stumble on flat ground when shouldering the false hopes of doctrine,
grave clothes of religion – its diminishments. Falling headlong
on easy roads we can’t enjoy for our straining to explain.
We scratch at stones, wet from dawn-drenched, day-breath,
looking for what signs of life emerge.
But, it hides itself away in the damp unseen,
crevices unnoticed by all that never knows light.
Beauty grows savage, flowers pushing up through concrete,
stem intact, root-sutured rock.
Water still moves under winter’s deep-crusted yawn.
Finches fly back north to signal summer’s return.
There is a beauty too perfect for vain curiosities,
hope, hunted for, but stuck in the idolatry of certainty.
We are as we are grown, have groaned –
greater in the scars of our days.
