Pain and Sweetness

Eleanor Peers

The Flower by George Herbert

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;

         To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                      Grief melts away

                      Like snow in May,

         As if there were no such cold thing.

         Who would have thought my shriveled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

         Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown,

                      Where they together

                      All the hard weather,

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell

         And up to heaven in an hour;

Making a chiming of a passing-bell.

                      We say amiss

                      This or that is:

         Thy word is all, if we could spell.

         Oh that I once past changing were,

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!

         Many a spring I shoot up fair,

Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;

                      Nor doth my flower

                      Want a spring shower,

         My sins and I joining together.

         But while I grow in a straight line,

Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,

         Thy anger comes, and I decline:

What frost to that? what pole is not the zone

                      Where all things burn,

                      When thou dost turn,

         And the least frown of thine is shown?

         And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

         I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing. Oh, my only light,

                      It cannot be

                      That I am he

         On whom thy tempests fell all night.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide;

         Which when we once can find and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;

                      Who would be more,

                      Swelling through store,

         Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

This poem for me catches the pain and the sweetness of Lent – a pain and sweetness you feel as much in the halting onset of spring as in the Lenten liturgy and fast. The final verse takes us to the fulfilling of that sweetness – a fulfilment that takes us beyond any oscillation between growth and decay, pleasure and pain, or life and death. We start to perceive the divine love that lay behind even the phases of suffering and futility. This love is both fierce and wise, beyond anything we can imagine or express. In fact, this love is so vast as to be everything that is. God nurtures us into understanding – despite ourselves – that we are as fragile and helpless as tiny flowers, gliding on his love. And so this poem accompanies us through the painful confrontations of Lent and the violence of Holy Week, to bring us to the Easter Resurrection: Christ has lovingly prepared a garden for us, through his own flesh and blood.

Alec Roth recently set four verses to music. Here is a recording by the choir of Salisbury Cathedral:

My cup overflows

Katharine Ames-Lewis

When I was a student, I remember visiting a room in another college which belonged to the conductor of a small choir I had recently joined. It was late February. On the outer door of his room was a poster – a picture of a bunch of daffodils, and the words:                        

                                                 It is spring!

                                                It is also Lent!

I have often thought that the second statement seemed to be there to tone down the exuberance of the first. The energy of Spring needed to be brought to its sober senses. But, on second thoughts, perhaps the link between the daffodils and Lent, rather than with Easter, can give us some useful hints.

Of course, we may well associate the trumpeting joyousness of the yellow daffs more with Easter celebration rather with the sobering thoughts of ‘Forty days and forty nights’. 

Our church is traditionally undecorated with flowers until Easter Eve, except for the breathing space of Mothering Sunday – or Refreshment Sunday as it is otherwise called – when we relieve the bareness with little posies of spring flowers. 

But another name for the daffodil is ‘Lent Lily’ and ‘Lent’ is a word synonymous in Old English with ‘Spring’ (Lenz in German). So perhaps we can usefully look to the flower for some insights in the keeping of a good Lent.

I like to think of the daffodil as a brimming cup as much as a trumpet. The cup is open to receive and to be filled, just as we can be open to God’s presence in prayer. The cup also suggests our longing for community, for hospitality, for good things shared with others. Perhaps its chalice-like shape may express our longing for the sharing of the Common Cup of the Eucharist, and even remind us of the cup of suffering Christ drank for us at the crucifixion. Our cup may ‘overflow’ with blessings.

The flower cup will also proclaim joy and hope, its petals flung back in triumph at the Resurrection.

Spring does not need to be muted by Lent.

Can I let myself be filled this Lent with God’s glowing presence and the energy of spring so that I can sing out Alleluia at Easter?

Considering the Lilies

Jenny Harris

Christ in the Wilderness - Consider the lilies | Stanley Spencer

For the flowers are great blessings.

For the Lord made a Nosegay in the meadow with his disciples and preached upon the lily.

For the angels of God took it out of his hand and carried it to the Height.

For a man cannot have publick spirit, who is void of private benevolence.

For there is no Height in which there are not flowers.

For flowers have great virtues for all the senses.

For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary.

For the flowers have their angels even the words of God's Creation.

For the warp and woof of flowers are worked by perpetual moving spirits.

For flowers are good both for the living and the dead.

For there is a language of flowers.

For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.

For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers.

For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.

For flowers are medicinal.

For flowers are musical in ocular harmony.

For the right names of flowers are yet in heaven. God make gard'ners better nomenclators.

(An excerpt from Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart)

On Ash Wednesday we remember that we are dust. And this dust and clay of the wilderness is also soil, from which God makes the flowers grow.

Lent prepares us to walk the way of the cross, but it also prepares us for the flower-strewn walk into springtime at Easter. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

The fasting period of Lent coincides with what is traditionally called the ‘hungry gap’: the period in the agricultural year when the winter stores are depleted and not much from the new season is ready to eat. The crops, the fruits and vegetables, may not be ready yet, but the blossom on the fruit trees is a promise that they are growing, and they will ripen.

Stanley Spencer depicts Jesus in the wilderness enjoying flowers, specifically these daisies. Christ fills the entire frame, paying close meditative attention — adoration, even — to this simple wonder of creation, as I hope to also in March, when the daisies miraculously reappear.

We do not (usually) eat flowers, but they are nourishing nevertheless. I have certainly felt, looking today at the snowdrops and aconites that irrepressibly show their faces through the snow, that the flowers are great blessings. I might go so far as to say that they are medicinal.

When we take time to reconnect with our place in the natural world, when we call the flowers by their names and receive their blessing, we participate in the continual adoration of the angels, and we are reminded that, like the lilies and the daisies, we do not live by our own efforts, but are fed and clothed in due season by our loving God.

Poet and mystic Christopher Smart understood a thing or two about lockdown. Between May 1757 and January 1763, he was confined to a private asylum in London [1]. Prior to this he had written metrical, sometimes satirical poetry, but while confined he wrote a long, deeply strange poem modelled on the psalms, probably by writing a few lines every day.

Smart’s consolations in his confinement are his joy in language, particularly the language of the psalms, and the consolations of nature, including his famous lines about his cat Jeoffry, as well as this less well-known section about flowers that I have chosen to excerpt. Like many of us, he turned to gardening in his confinement. For Smart, language and nature are intimately and inseparably connected.

When Smart writes ‘For the right names of flowers are yet in heaven. God make gard'ners better nomenclators.’, he evokes Adam, who first yoked nature to language by naming all the animals and plants of the garden. But Smart asserts that language is not in fact human, but rather divine, and as such as unknowable to us in its essence as any part of God. The ‘right names of flowers’ can only be discovered via divine revelation. And any mystic knows that revelation has to be preceded by contemplation.

Like Spencer’s Christ, and like Christopher Smart, let us spend some of our time in the wilderness on a contemplation of God’s creation. By our adoring gaze on the spring flowers, let us learn the truth of God’s fathomless love for flowers, and God’s fathomless love for us, and so come to understand the Passion, and the cross, flowing out of that love as inevitably as the March daisies spring from the cold earth.

---

[1] Dr Johnson wrote about this: “Madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world. My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place.”

The Saviour’s Endurance

Clive Wilmer

Man of Sorrows, by William Dyce

The Man of Sorrows is by the Victorian artist William Dyce. It depicts the temptation in the wilderness but, perhaps surprisingly, includes no representation of the tempter. Jesus turns away from the centre of the composition, as if there were a figure to turn away from, and the harsh rocks remind us of the devil’s first temptation: ‘If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.’ I imagine Jesus as being about to reply: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’

Dyce was a serious Christian who, as a painter, eschewed the supernatural. The bleakly naturalistic landscape, painted not in Palestine but in his native Scotland, exemplifies a more than passing interest in the science of geology. But in that age of doubt, the geological record represented a challenge to the Biblical account of Creation and therefore to the strength of Christian faith. Compare a quotation from Dyce’s contemporary John Ruskin: ‘If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’ So the rocks represent a further temptation, one that forces me to re-examine what we understand by ‘every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’.

 Like many Victorian artists, Dyce believed that the close study of nature would reveal sacred truths, though it seemed to risk undermining them. Where landscape was concerned, close study meant painting in the open air. But the study of the human body could only take place in the studio and under a different light. Some would say it is a fault in the picture that, because of this, Jesus does not quite belong in the landscape or indeed in natural light. To speak personally, it strikes me as true to the Gospel story that Jesus should appear both as a human body in the world and as a spirit haunted by desolation. Grim as the image is, it seems to offer us, through the Saviour’s endurance, a release from emptiness. Looking at it as we embark on the season of Lent, I am reminded of a prayer from the service of Evensong: ‘O God… give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give.’

Wilderness-21

Andrew Welchman

There is a space between the bedroom and the spare room where the wilderness begins. 
It is not a wasteland, desert, or a tundra, 
but a dry place of screens and routine.

 
The onset of the camel carpet signifies mediated meetings 
through electronic-everythings 
with legless colleagues and acquaintances,
whose powerpointed thinking 
reminds us that the devil lives in detail.

 
The echoes of camaraderie have become passing saccharine,
a smile instantly wiped as the camera stops.
And as the day wears on,
this wilderness bears witness to the prodromal twitches
that a nice glass of white will make it all right.

Last year’s muted Paschal triumph became a comma,
the demarcation of Lent lessened by ongoing similarity.
And the purple, red, gold and green beats of liturgy cycled on an electronic whirr.

 
But now we pause again to start at alpha,
and must weave home comforts into spiritual refreshment.

 
The wilderness is reborn through repentance and baptism,
striking dry rocks lets forth the mellifluous Word,
and the beating wings of prayer create the heavenward throng.

 
The path we walk is guided,
with a miracle far greater as our prize.
Let us gird our loins, shoe our feet, with our staffs at hand.

Apparently not doing very much

Eona Bell

Christ in the Wilderness - The Hen | Stanley Spencer

This painting is one of a series which Stanley Spencer made to explore the time which Jesus spent in the wilderness. He planned forty images, one for each day of Lent, but only eight were completed.  The Gospels tell us very little about what Jesus did in that time, and Spencer’s pictures imaginatively fill some of that gap, with scenes which depict Christ’s encounter with creatures living in the desert – foxes, eagles and these hens – which symbolically point to his future ministry and teaching.

I struggle with the idea of deliberately ‘going into the desert’ to come close to God. The thoughts which can flood in when I remove myself from distractions may be terrifying and painful. Why would I want to lay myself open to hurt and acute awareness of my own failures?  Why not protect myself instead with a comfortable padding of busyness and feel safe doing ‘good works’ for the Lord?

Certainly, I can recall times in ‘desert places’ when God has blessed me not with temptation or challenge but with a profound sense of peace and awareness of his eternal goodness. I think of moments of utter stillness, often experienced during holidays which have left me with memories of sights and sounds to which I can return in my imagination when I need refreshment.

On the other hand, I rebel mentally against the notion that only by leaving the duties and business of ordinary life can I truly meet God and discover who he wants me to be. If God is in all things, is he not in the mess and banality of my family life, and in the daily struggles of many millions of people in the world who must work without respite for their basic survival?

That is why I like Spencer’s image of Christ, the hen and her chicks.  There she sits, apparently doing not very much but actually hard at work minding her babies, stretching out her neck to see what they are doing, a calm but watchful and secure presence as they scratch and peck and nestle in her feathers, doing their important work of feeding and growing to maturity. Her world has shrunk to the short distance the chicks can waddle, while in the meantime the cockerel struts off to another world, beyond the dunes, which she can only imagine. She mustn’t let her mind stray to bigger, deeper thoughts, because the minutiae of her chicks’ lives demand all her attention.

And Jesus sees this. There is Christ, watching the chicks with the mother hen, and watching over her too, sheltering them all in his massive, all-embracing, living form.  What love there is in his eyes as he gazes at them, and it almost seems he expects nothing more of them than that they simply be as they are. There is more, though, because the little bird flying in towards the hen is not her chick but a brown sparrow. Gently, by his example, Christ invites mother hen to welcome this stranger, expand her brood and share in his work of love, simply by being who she was made to be.

A Lenten Gift

Jenny Walpole

I want to lay something down for Jesus
A small offering to bring, to lay at His feet
Like a curious squirrel with a modest sized nut
The gift has some meaning but not very much
Something I clasp in my hand which I think that I need
And replace it with something to hold in my heart
Then sit under a tree, on a sofa or pew
And ponder the love that is always abound
I wait for the earth to call out my name
Then I’m back on the treadmill of living again
 

This Lent I am aware of how much we have already given up, and thoughts of further sacrifice and self-denial make me wonder when it will all end. At the same time, I recognise that Lent is a penitential season and I do want to reap the spiritual rewards that come from fasting and prayer. As I sat staring out of my window wondering if I had anything worth reflecting on, I saw a squirrel running up a tree. I imagined this busy little creature holding a nut, and Julian of Norwich sprang to mind. God showed her the image of a hazelnut, as a symbol of the whole world, and God loves it. The way that a squirrel holds a nut in its paws, looks like the nut means the world to the squirrel. Perhaps the things we give up are like the nut; they mean a lot more to us than they need to. Still, God accepts this gift of sacrifice and loves it anyway.

For Lent I am giving something up that has not been enforced by the circumstances of lockdown; it is fairly inconsequential but not entirely trivial. I want to give something up to lay at the feet of Jesus, and to consider this offering not as a burden but as a gift, a small gift. Each year when the season of Lent comes around, I try to respond in a meaningful way but the action never quite matches the whole-hearted intention. This year I seek again a connection with God and try to create some space, and wait for the earth to move beneath the surface. Signs of spring are always welcome, and as the sunlight warms the frozen garden, the hope of Easter is on my mind.

The lockdown has allowed me some respite from an unrelenting pace; this won’t be everyone’s experience but is something for which I am grateful. The final line of the poem conveys the idea that returning to the busy-ness of life after spending time in prayer is a grind but an inevitable part of our human experience. Spending time in prayer and engaging with Lenten practice, however modest is still a sacrificial offering and our gift of love. 

The Chosen Fast

Ryan Gilfeather

Is not this the fast that I choose

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them?

Isaiah 58.6-7

 About three hundred years after Christ died, Macrina the Younger was born in the far reaches of the Eastern Roman Empire, with every advantage and privilege. She was a wealthy slave owner, entitled by birth to marry well and pursue a life of comfort. But, she chose the better path. When Macrina looked at her mother, she saw a gentle loving Christan woman, but she also noticed the luxury, excess and injustice. This woman’s estate was so large that it stretched over three different provinces of the empire, her brood of sons travelled to Athens to attend the finest schools in the land, and her table overflowed with every kind of food and wine, whilst enslaved bodies toiled to maintain this ostentatious existence. Seeing all of this and knowing that she was entitled to follow in her mother’s path, Macrina set herself before God. As Macrina sat in the stillness of prayer, God showed her how luxury was wrong when it is sustained by injustice. So, Macrina chose her fast, she renounced this life for herself but she also slowly encouraged her mother to do so too, until they both embarked on a simple life together, freeing their slaves and living alongside them as equals.

Macrina can be a beacon for us today, her story offers us a grace which we can transfer into our own lives. Lent is a time when the church collectively fasts as we prepare for the death and resurrection of Christ. However, fasting takes a different shape and shade of meaning for all of us, some wish to build discipline whilst others use it to draw close to God. As we heard above, Macrina’s fast seems to mirror God’s instructions in Isaiah: “Is not this the fast that I choose to loose the bonds of injustice... Is it not to share your bread with the hungry?” Macrina gives something up just as we do in Lent but she also uses it as an opportunity to break the bonds of injustice and to benefit the marginalised. There are a couple of ways that we might follow her path. On one hand, if we save money as a result of giving something up this Lent, we could donate it to local food banks. And, on the other, we could choose to give up foods which harm the environment, like meat and dairy, because the economically marginalised are disproportionately affected by climate change.

Any kind of fasting we choose this Lent is good and will draw us closer to God. However, the reading from Isaiah and the story of Macrina ask us to do things differently this year: to fast in such a way that benefits those who suffer most from injustice and poverty.

Be Still

Heather Boyd

My sister sent me this piece of music last week. As I listened to the introduction for the first time, I thought ‘I wish this piece would get a move on!’ 

Here I am in lockdown with 14 pressure-free waking hours every day, willing a 5-minute piece of music to get a move on! 

But as I continued to listen, I noticed my breathing slow down, the words lulling me. I was like a baby being soothed. I needed this pace.

Be still (my Love), and know that I am God.

Eight simple words that take me deeper in this moment than the many spiritual books sitting on my bed side table.

It doesn’t take very much to rescue us from our harried lives, our fretful thoughts, our compulsion to fill our days with what we perceive to be meaningful tasks. 

A poem, birdsong, a sunset, a loving phone call, or in this case a song. 

And as the piece ends, I don’t move. I want to savour the stillness it has gifted me.

 Be still (my Love)and know that I am God.

How is it that so slow and simple and unsophisticated a tune, with words I have heard a hundred times before, has recalibrated me today? I might even say it has re-tuned me.

Inadvertently, almost reluctantly, I have been given what I most need today. I HAVE been stilled, and beyond my searching, analytical mind, today I DO know...

What might help you to slow down today?

What would it be like to live today in tune, with God, yourself and others?

What words do you need to hear?

Bright Sadness

Katherine Stevenson

This time last year my husband, Austin, and I had just found out that we were expecting a baby - we were overjoyed. But by the time Ash Wednesday came around, the pregnancy nausea had really begun to kick in. I remember sitting in the Corpus Christi chapel, head in hand, chewing on a ginger candy to fight the nausea and willing myself to make it through the service. When we started singing the hymn ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’ one particular verse stuck out to me:

 Let us thine endurance share 
And awhile from joys abstain
With thee watching unto prayer
Strong with thee to suffer pain 

I remember being struck by the thought that it was fitting to be entering the Lenten season at the same time I was going through my first trimester: endurance, abstention & suffering all with the anticipation and hope of what’s to come. This formed in me a ‘bright sadness’. (I still have the photo I quickly took of the hymnal to mark the moment).

Forty days and forty nights came and went, and my extreme nausea carried on, painful and debilitating—the expected reprieve didn’t come. At the same time, Easter morning came and went without us gathering together to celebrate the joy of the resurrection. My nausea continued for another 12 weeks, the pandemic raged on unabated; Lent, it seemed, had never come to an end.

Seasons of suffering don’t always end in complete relief and the immense joy of a new life, but this one did with the birth of our daughter, and for that I’m ever thankful. There are those facing prolonged suffering with no hope of reprieve and many are still feeling the struggles of 2020. The lessons of Lent – abstention, endurance, and even suffering – draw us closer to God and open our eyes anew to his grace. Lent gives us a chance, not to embrace our suffering as if it was good in itself, but to direct our suffering to goodness. It also reminds us of the needs of those who suffer in our midst.  

Keep, O keep us, Saviour dear
Ever constant by thy side
That with thee we may appear
At the eternal Eastertide