Hear Our Silence

Derek Walcott, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1992

Love after love

The time will come

when with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door

in your own mirror

And each will smile

at the other’s welcome

and say

Sit here

eat

You will love again

the stranger who was your self

Give wine

Give bread

Give back your heart

to itself

to the stranger who has loved you

all your life

Whom you ignored

for another

who knows you

by heart

Take down the love letters

from the bookshelf

the photographs

the desperate notes

peel your own image

from the mirror

Sit

Feast on you Life

Each month I send a letter to Friend’s of Hear our Silence together with four readings, texts to chew upon. I chose Walcott’s wonderfully inviting poem as a hopeful beacon for our next year, 2008. Changing our troubled world begins within by recognizing my own true value as Self.

Indian Buddha - Dhyana Mudra

A comforting by-product of packing and moving is that you attend to familiar objects for the first time in a while. Shortly before his release, my friend Zes handed me his Buddha which he had kept in his cell over his long five year sentence. It fits comfortably in one’s hand: but the ebony wood gives it solid weight. A moving thankyou gift.

For the first couple of hundred years after his death, the Buddha was never represented, merely carried in the memory of his followers. When effigies began to appear at last, at once a strict code of representation fell into place. Only a limited number of positions were considered proper: the praying, the teaching - even the walking Buddha.

The Indian Buddha always has a pointed top-knot on his head. Like all other Buddhas his ear lobes are stretched (through wearing playboy earings long ago), his shoulders are quite smooth and so on.

Zes gave me Dhyana Mudra, the meditating Buddha. He sits cross-legged, his feet and hands turned vertically upwards. He seems to stare straight ahead and through you into the One he contemplates.

Buddhism overcomes pain by riding through it: Christianity receives human suffering as the road along which we travel and encounter Christ.

We must be experiencing the same human existence: how then do our explanations converge?

Judith and I were both busy putting our stuff into boxes for our move next week, when the door bell rings. My friend Anthony Walker stands large as life with his New Year gift, a honey toned unlabelled bottle: Carthusian elixir - cider from Parkminster.

             Anthony, a second cousin thrice removed (? never very good at that) of G.K. Chesterton, and his wife Jenny have a soft spot for the Carthusians. Jen bakes them cakes on high days and holidays: Anthony attends their Latin mass for externs Sunday by Sunday. He lives closer than me and I am very jealous…

Brother Augustine’s cider is a masterclass. He should know how, for he has been at his press for the past umpteen years; but unlike our noble sculptured figure, he does NOT unrobe at his task. His elixir can be bought at a nearby farm shop; more’s the pity it is not distributed to a wider public. But that might lead Parkminster down the Buckfast road to ruin. [Buckfast Wine is the favoured tipple of half the youth of Glasgow.]

What is on sale through the St Hugh’s website is a wide choice of books. See my Parkminster link and go to Books and Donations.

Listen to News of Great Joy

This is great joy

when the soul

gathered within herself

becomes aware

of a Power

of a Space

in her

from which

the Father

is never missing

Wherein

the Father

is begetting

his Son

without ceasing

When the soul

knows this

is Alive to this

then there is great joy

While creatures sleep

God speaks his Silent Word

who leaps

into my Soul

Meister Eckhart: sermo on Christmas Day

We are about to move. A forty foot van will draw up outside our home on January 3 and begin loading all our goods and chattels. So, planning ahead, I present myself at our local police station to request our pavement be coned off the day before.

A nice lady comes to the opposite side of the desk, wearing what appears to be some kind of official uniform. I offer her a Christmastide smile, only to see her face impervious as some Antarctic iceflow.

I begin: we are moving, I wonder…

Where are you moving? Puzzled, I mutter up country. Somerset, actually but does that matter?

What is the address? She persists. Again I am lost. Are the entire police forces of the nation now so interlocked by one massive computer that they are about to cone off our entire 100 mile route???

Eventually we stagger over the first hurdle. She is asking for our home address, here in Axminster. We then move on to dates. We are moving on the Friday, but loading a day ahead. So our precious cones need to be laid on the Wednesday - in good time to ward off any stray parking.

She produces a blank pad and struggles to find a pen. I have one here, I offer. But by this time she remembers that part of her uniform, just below her shoulder is a cleverly concealed pocket designed to carry her biro. This is now to hand and she begins to write down details.

So you want cones…yes and we will have to do that on the Second. No, comes the peremptory reply, you cannot lay down cones. That has to be done by a police officer. Granted, I whimper, now on the verge of tears, I was merely trying to refer to the act of getting them laid along the pavement - in good time.

But the Second will be Sunday. We can’t lay cones on a Sunday!!!

By this time I wish I had never begun this tumble dryer of a talk. I do hope you never have to arrest me, I say through clenched teeth: it will never work.

I convince her that her Sunday doesn’t exist and that the Second is but a Wednesday. We are both of us trying, I coax: and she reluctantly agrees.

At last, I turn to go only to find the door will not open.

Push outwards she advises. And I escape from Alice’s Wonderland.

FOOTNOTE

Our eldest son, Charlie, is having tooth trouble. But he has found a competent dentist in Clapham. Only he is Greek. No matter, at his right hand is a comely Australian nurse who translates for him.

He’s coming on, she tells Charlie. But sometimes communication still breaks down. Yesterday he asked a young woman who had come for a filling: are you numbered now. And she thought he was asking her for her telephone number…

It was Eliot who complained:

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure 

‘Comfort Ye my People’

The Father speaks his Word

for us to hear

Listen to his Silence