Liturgy For A Meditation on Force
This liturgy was compiled by Bishop Richard Holloway for the 2005 UK national conference, "Beyond Good and Evil: the challenge of reconciliation.
You can understand the true condition of life only if you use your imagination to hold onto a sense of the ruthlessness of the natural forces that could waste the bright surface—Charles Darwin
Still one more year of preparation. Tomorrow at the latest Ill start working on a great book In which my century will appear as it really was. The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked. Springs and autumns will unerringly return, In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay And foxes will learn their foxy natures.
And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.
No, it wont happen tomorrow. In five or ten years. I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of a woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flames; a bulldozer sweeps him into a claypit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.
I havent learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.
Czeslaw Milosz
'Move him into the sun - Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, - Woke, once, the clays of a cold star. Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides, Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? - O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?'
Wilfrid Owen
At the Vietnam Memorial
The last time I saw Paul Castle it was printed in gold on the wall above the showers in the boys locker room, next to the school record for the mile. I dont recall his time, but the year was 1968 and I can look across the infield of memory to see him on the track, legs flashing, body bending slightly beyond the pack of runners at his back.
He couldnt spare a word for me, two years younger, junior varsity, and hardly worth the waste of breath. He owned the hallways, a cool blonde at his side, and aimed his interests further down the line than we could guess.
Now, reading the name again, I see us standing in the showers, naked kids beneath his larger, comprehensive forcethe ones who trail obscurely, in the wake of the swift, like my shadow on this gleaming wall.
Bilgere
He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded
I sit down on the floor of a school for the retarded, a writer of magazine articles accompanying a band that was met at the door by a child in a man's body who asked them, 'Are you the surprise they promised us?'
It's Ryan Fancy, Dermot on guitar, Fergus on banjo, Denis on penny-whistle. In the eyes of this audience, they're everybody who has ever appeared on TV. I've been telling lies to a boy who cried because his favourite detective hadn't come with us; I said he had sent his love and, no, I didn't think he'd mind if I signed his name to a scrap of paper: when the boy took it, he said, 'Nobody will ever get this away from me', in the voice, more hopeless than defiant, of one accustomed to finding that his hiding places have been discovered, used to having objects snatched out of his hands. Weeks from now I'll send him another autograph, this one genuine in the sense of having been signed by somebody on the same payroll as the star. Then I'll feel less ashamed. Now everyone is singing, 'Old MacDonald had a farm,' and I don't know what to do
about the young woman (I call her a woman because she's twenty-five at least, but think of her as a little girl, she plays that part so well, having known no other), about the young woman who sits down beside me and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, rests her head on my shoulder.
It's nine o'clock in the morning, not an hour for music. And, at the best of times, I'm uncomfortable in situations where I'm ignorant of the accepted etiquette: it's one thing to jump a fence, quite another to blunder into one in the dark. I look around me for a teacher to whom to smile out my distress. They're all busy elsewhere. 'Hold me,' she whispers. 'Hold me.'
I put my arm around her. 'Hold me tighter.' I do, and she snuggles closer. I half-expect someone in authority to grab her or me; I can imagine this being remembered for ever as the time the sex-crazed writer publicly fondled the poor retarded girl. 'Hold me,' she says again. What does it matter what anybody thinks? I put my other arm around her, rest my chin in her hair, thinking of children real children, and of how they say it, 'Hold me,' and of a patient in a geriatric ward I once heard crying out to his mother, dead for half a century, 'I'm frightened! Hold me!' and of a boy-soldier screaming it on the beach at Dieppe, of Nelson in Hardy's arms, of Frieda gripping Lawrence's ankle until he sailed off in his Ship of Death.
It's what we all want, in the end, to be held, merely to be held, to be kissed (not necessarily on the lips, for every touching is a kind of kiss).
She hugs me now, this retarded woman, and I hug her. We are brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, husband and wife. We are lovers. We are two human beings huddled together for a little while by the fire in the Ice Age, two hundred thousand years ago.
Alden Nowlan
From Bourgeois Land
Children, follow the dwarfs and the giants and the wolves into the Wood of Unknowing, into the leaves
where the terrible granny perches and sings to herself past the tumultuous seasons high on her shelf.
Do not go with the Man with the Smiling Face nor yet with the Lady with the Flowery Dress
Avoid the Crystal, run where the waters go and follow them past the Icebergs and the Snow.
Avoid the man with the Book, the Speech Maker and the Rinsoed Boy who is forever clean.
Keep clear of the Scholar and the domestic Dog and, rather than Sunny Smoothness, choose the Fog.
Follow your love, the butterfly where it spins over the wall, the hedge, the road, the fence,
And love the Disordered Man who sings like a river, whose form is Love, whose country is Forever.
Ian Crichton Smith
Philippians [2:1-8] If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.
[Mark 10:32-45] They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, "See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again."
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?" And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."
[Matthew 5:1-12] When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Wildpeace
Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only about a great weariness. I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. And my son plays with a toy gun that knows how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. A peace without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares, without words, without the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light, floating, like lazy white foam. A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing? (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.)
Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.
Yehuda Amichai