Akathistos Hymn

Celebrating the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary today with friends at Bishop's Staff, Archdeacon Karen brought us a poem by Denise Levertov, about the faith, openness, and Mary.

I hadn’t come across DL since reading her Penguin Modern Poets sub-collection (with Kenneth Rexroth and Wiliam Carlos Williams) which records indicate I read in May 1971! After that she did all sorts of fabulous things, including discovering Christianity for herself in 1984, and her poem from 1989 is inspired by a line from the 6th Century Greek Orthodox Akathisthos, from which it takes its title:

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’

We know the scene:
the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book;
always the tall lily.

Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador,
standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience.
No one mentions courage.

The engendering Spirit did not
enter her without consent.

God waited. She was free to accept or to refuse,
choice integral to humanness.

Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending.

More often those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from in dread,
in a wave of weakness,
in despair and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

She had been a child who played, ate,
slept like any other child –
but unlike others, wept only for pity,
laughed in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence fused in her,
indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

only asked a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness;
to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity;
to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power –
in narrow flesh, the sum of light.

Then bring to birth, push out into air,
a Man-child needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,

Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.

She did not cry, "I cannot,
I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.

Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

The Work of Incarnation Close up

In Church on Sunday, Rosie the Vicar walked us through the Magnificat as a woman’s voice amidst the overwhelmingly male sounds of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. At Christmas, I was moved and delighted with a greeting better than any card from Katherine Kaye in Oxford. She wrote:

This is a poem called "Not Art", by Kate Clanchy, an Oxford poet. It is one version of female experience which, as a man, you can only look in on, what it means to visit the place where women show one another wares, their handicrafts, and what is gain: so unspectacular, so unshowy, so not what the dominant ones notice, let alone "count" - and yet what makes us what we are. Our true home is in our childhood. That, and a recommendation that you listen to the three ages of women in Durufle's "Tota pulchra es" make up my Christmas gift to you: more perspectives still.

The image of Our Lady is from the Church at Saint-Wandrille — a final picture I took during this year’s stay. It is actually a nineteenth century iron casting (I kid you not) taken of an original in the Louvre.

Not Art

This is close work, this baby-stuff,
the intricate wiping and wrapping,
the slow unpicking of miniature fists;
village-work, a hand-craft, all bodges
and spit, the gains inchingly small
as the knotting of carpets, raw wool
rasping in the teeth of the comb.
The strewing and stooping, the prising
of muck from the grain of the floor -
I think of gleaners, ash-sifters, of tents
sewn with shoe soles, wedding veils, plaits,
how patchwork is stitched-up detritus,
how it circles on quilts like a house split
to bits when the typhoon has passed.
And the ache in the neck, in the back,
in the foot, are the knocks of wood looms,
narrow as cradles, borne from pasture
to valley to camp. I am learning
the art of mistakes, to accept
that the marks of each day are woven in
by evening too far back to pick out.
This is the work women draw from the river,
wet to the waist, singing in time,
the work we swing from our shoulders,
lay on the ground and let the crowd
hold and finger and value - the young girls
wondering, the laughing old women,
the bent, the milk-eyed, the blind.

Giant Prickly Virgin Births

Ah! Bless! Parthenogenesis in our very own home on Christmas Eve. After a week or so of voracious bramble chomping in the tank, the complete stripping of all vegetation from their habitat, our first stick insect egg of this batch arrived last week, and now has six sisters.

Like other phasmids, MacLeay’s Spectres (Extatosoma Tiarata) reproduce in two ways —

1. Standard sexual reproduction (Vatican approved) which produces males and females, females with wing cases and males who fly. But for that you need males. We don’t have any, thus the girlie Phasmid Canoodling pictured below.
   
2. Parthenogenesis. Yes! Real Parthenogenesis! But I caution earnestly against any attempt to build a Dawkins busting Virgin Birth sermon out of such phenomena. I once heard it attempted, and it made Jesus sound simultaneously like a freak (some kind of superior stick insect) and a run of the mill natural phenomenon, and both are exactly not what St Matthew had in mind. And, of course, what the preacher forgot was that if this model provides any insight into events in the first century holy land, Jesus would have been a girl.
   

So, it’s seven Girls! and we await some 700 little sisters for them from our five giant prickly virgins in their tank. This could challenge those with wonky thinking about paradise — Good news, here are your 700 virgins: Bad news, they’re all stick insects — Hallelujah!

Wisdom and Night driving

From Benedictus to Magnificat — Today’s the Day everything changes gear. O Sapientia, 17 December, is named after the first of the great sequence of antiphons before the Magnificat, marking our final approach run to Christmas.
In the old money —

O Sapientia, quæ ex ore altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter,
suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiæ.

I love what this says — its depth and insight into how things really happen:

O wisdom that proceeds from the mouth of the most high, reaching powerfully from end to end, sweetly (elegantly, smoothly, gently) ordering everything: Come teach us the way of good judgment.

Much of today was a diocesan staff meeting. We’ve always been reasonably well-mannered and efficient, but I notice we’re working together more freely and joyfully. I put it down to a greater commitment to working at our relationships, and more time going beyond the shopping list of business items. In any enterprise there are things that need doing, and one strategy is to fixate on them until entirely functional and task driven. Do that and people try their best, but there’s always an x factor missing — harmony and understanding that comes from real working friendship, sincere ownership with open eyes.

You can only achieve corporate goals fully at a pace that matches your knowledge of each other. Like night driving, it’s only safe within your headlights. You may well get away with going faster, but output will be less than the group’s best, and everyone will have niggling doubts about it that they don’t want to own up to for fear of seeming to slow things down. It’s one mechanism that leads people to pretend things are better then they actually are. The same old niggling doubts surface and resurface ages after you thought the group decision had been taken. Better to trust God’s sweet ordering of everything, and invest more time in the people and their relationships — drive within the group’s headlights, not faster, and you actually arrive at a better place, possibly even sooner.