Homily By Edward Clarke

Homily By Edward Clarke

Transcription of a Homily, delivered by Edward Clarke at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, May 2019

by Edward Clarke, author of A Book of Psalms

 

It makes sense to me to begin with Mark S. Burrows’ poem, ‘What Glory’, as a text for my reflections this evening. 

I take such a poem as Mark’s very seriously, not least because it is rooted in our first reading from Mathew (6: 26-34). It is poem that makes us understand that the Bible is ‘the great code of art’ as much as the world around us.

It was in fact William Blake who said that the Bible is the great code of art in one of his annotations to his drawing of the Laocoön. He also noted there that ‘Prayer is the study of Art, Praise is the practice of Art’, and ‘A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect; the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.’ 
 
The sparrow, and even the lilies, in ‘What Glory’ might be emblematic of the inspired creator of art – Blake’s true Christian. But the poem also asks:
 
And what of us who sow 
our endless seeds of worry 
and persistent doubt? 
 
What are we with
our most fervent cares 
and earnest deeds? 
 
What glory of ours 
exceeds birdsong 
or seedburst?
 
I read the news, or look around, and understand that we certainly need to give up our post-war craving for material security and comfort, and even the kind of happiness everyone seems determined to sell me these days, those things, which in truth cause so much suffering in the world outside of this decadent bubble in which I live, in Oxford, in England, in the West.
 
In terms of my day to day to day life, as a slightly harassed father of two small boys, a man without a career as such, holding down five or six teaching jobs, it seems unlikely that I can forgo my fossil-fuelled Victorian house, my 13 inch MacBook Pro and iPhone 7, the emails I keep checking, which enable me so efficiently to serve ultimately Mammon. No doubt I will unintentionally and intentionally pass on the same bad and unsustainable habits to my children.
 
‘Money!’ I might well exclaim with Blake: ‘Money! which is the great Satan or Reason, the root of Good and Evil, in the Accusation of Sin’.
 
And I say to myself, remembering the words that come just before our first reading this evening:
 
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
 
But even if I understand the metaphysical problem at the heart of our current global ecological and political crises: that we have made ourselves subjects shut off from a world of objects we want to sell; that we have forgotten that everything that lives is holy and that our souls are the ground in which God can be transplanted and reborn, how likely is it that I can put the kingdom of God first in my day, give everything away that I own, and take no thought for the morrow, all those classes I have to teach, and really should be preparing: ‘for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ Tell that to my students, dear Lord. And how can I take no thought for my life, what I shall eat? I have a family to feed for Christ’s sake!
 
But then:
 
A lone sparrow sings into 
the edging morning light, 
spilling her praise into the 
 
rising day.
 

Mark S. Burrows makes us a poem out of Matthew 6, which would have us, like Christ,
 
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. 
 
But the speaker of the poem wonders about Christ’s following questions:
 
Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
 
I would like to claim that the sparrow is made in Mark’s poem to sit on the Tree of Life as a prototype of the inspired poet. Obviously, she knows nothing of money and
 
​never thinks of
some longer view but sings on 
 
because she’s made for this, 
her body a feathered muscle 
of praise which trills out 
 
a clear and unrelenting yes; 
her song is prayer unceasing, 
a rhyme untouched by reason. 
 
I think of such a bird as a model of praise, promisingly alive in its song in an eternal moment of creation, which only art can bring to fulfilment. But many today would probably ask, is to make such a prayer merely to neglect the looming catastrophes of our world? Does that sparrow or indeed Christ in his sermon on the mount advocate a kind of rapt escapism. Surely, we should be looking to the science of Mammon for a solution to our problems. Wind turbines perhaps. Or solar panels.
 
In my bleakest moments I understand that the final part that art has to play in our world today may just be to console a population on the point of almost certain extinction. Or perhaps a few million, or a few thousand will survive, and live precariously, hating each other, among the ruins of our culture, which itself grew out of the ruins of an earlier one.
 
The church a thousand or so years ago was a militant force. Today it lacks vigour in our culture. Very few of my friends would dream of setting foot in a church to worship or consider themselves Christians.
 
And yet as I proceeded with my own book of Psalms I had a revelation that everything non-human around us is continually praising God, and that the Book of Psalms is a kind of manual of praise: a book structured in such a way as to initiate you into a life of praise, so that you can complete, in the last judgement of art, the eternal act of creation, and that if we could all become so initiated we might change the world from the inside out, rather than relying on the money-driven decisions of politicians, or our sciences, which are hampered by their reliance on funding and a diseased metaphysic.
 
For Blake, the Last Judgment is an experience through which individuals, no less than civilizations, must pass and ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’, ‘abd its Vision is seen by the [Imaginative Eye] of Every one according to the situation he holds.’
 
Wallace Stevens ends his Collected Poems with a cry like ‘A new knowledge’ of such a second coming, apocalyptically ‘still far away’, ‘yet close enough to wake | The chords above your bed to-night’. The cry comes from ‘A chorister whose c preceded the choir’, the scrawny cry of a bird that ‘Seemed like a sound’ in the poem’s speaker’s mind, as he wakes at the sweet hour of prime on the spring equinox, and it is a sound that heralds the future in man today:
 
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
 
In Stevens, as in Blake and Mark S. Burrows, ‘What is under consideration is an event whose nature is rather a subtle change of awareness than a temporal fact’: ‘the gathering of essential being’, as a philosopher like Heidegger would say.

 
In ‘What Glory’, Mark S. Burrows obeys a divine injunction: ‘idly’ he considers the lilies of the field, or those that bloom ‘promiscuously along the road’. His poems appreciate ‘how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin’, and yet ‘even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’.


The poet’s question is: Will you dare to turn and step aside from the march toward importance, to care enough to save your life, at least a little, and brush the hems of glory as they come close and pass you by?
 
When I read books of poetry like Mark’s Chance of Home, from which ‘What Glory’ is taken, I find myself becoming more profoundly happy, if that is the right word, more upright and at ease, kinder even, and certainly more attentive to life outside of the book, once I put it down.
 
I would say that this is because Mark finds value in the self-secluding presence of the language of the sense, which is where we must dwell creatively. As we respond to, or make, awork of art, like a poem, the essence of the divine is brought into the play of its language, and into our lives potentially, and we are raised beyond ourselves into something greater than we knew. In this way Art is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life on which we move towards apprehension of the divine child who would be born into, and grow up inside, the human imagination.
 
Or as Mark says "Again we find ourselves gathered by poems, 
by language shaped in the wide and spacious silences beyond our naming, a handful of words   thrown onto the canvas of the old certainties— ambitions of war and other efficiencies of state, and the politics of greed that drive the brokers of this world."
 
Such poetry refuses ‘the seduction | of their strategies’, understanding, with Blake, that ‘Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only’. 
 
There is a power or joy – or spark of infinitude or speck of Paradise – in the soul so deep that it touches neither time nor flesh nor words nor money, and although none could ever tell of it, I believe that there is a certain kind of art, that can at least help us to discover that transformative moment of beatitude in each day in which we see into the life of things: that moment that Satan cannot find, in which the sparrow sings. That moment when we say, with Wallace Stevens, ‘God and the imagination are one.’ At that moment we are gathered by the ‘intensest rendezvous’, and feel the quickening of ‘A light, a power, the miraculous influence’. A great virtue of poetry is that it can take you out of the world’s money-making business, and slow you down for a spell, until your consciousness can admit the acceleration of divine intuition. In this way it can put the kingdom of God first in your life.
 
If the world was created and all of scripture written so that God may be born in the soul, and our imagination in God, can art, and especially poetry, function as a means of intensifying and clarifying our relations with our world and that book to facilitate this divine birth?

B. Yeats understood that in a society that has cast out imaginative tradition [as ours has I believe], only a few people--three or four thousand out of millions--favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet 'the imagination is the man himself.' The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts into their service because men understood that when imagination is impoverished, a principal voice--some would say the only voice--for the awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity, can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent.

No other art form engages so thoroughly as poetry with that which makes us human, our language, to transform our relations with others in the world and in the light of divine truth. 
How will our future have been changed if the divine is awakened in man through poetry?

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