From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
by Yehuda Amichai, with thanks to Maggi Dawn
Limen is the Latin word for threshold. A “liminal space” is the crucial in-between time—when everything actually happens and yet nothing appears to be happening. It is the waiting period when the cake bakes, the movement is made, the transformation takes place. One cannot just jump from Friday to Sunday in this case, there must be Saturday! This, of course, was always the holy day for the Jewish tradition. The Sabbath rest was the pivotal day for the Jews, and even the dead body of Jesus rests on Saturday, waiting for God to do whatever God plans to do. It is our great act of trust and surrender, both together. A new “creation ex nihilo” is about to happen, but first it must be desired. . . .
Remember, hope is not some vague belief that “all will work out well,” but biblical hope is the certainty that things finally have a victorious meaning no matter how they turn out. We learned that from Jesus, which gives us now the courage to live our lives forward from here. Maybe that is the full purpose of Lent.
Richard Rohr, from Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent, Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 2010
Reading this passage from Rohr, I was suddenly reminded of an Easter Saturday poem I wrote many years ago. The weather’s wrong for this Easter – it was an early Easter that year on the North-East coast – but otherwise it says what I’m feeling better than I probably could today, in this glorious late spring sunshine…
LIMINAL
Shallow sky’s thin edge
with sea and grey – lost
with pattern layers
into distance, thread cold
in no reckoned afternoon –
hatches its waiting
in a slow tide quick
with dunlin.Stitched frail attributes
the day brought down
to no rain yet, or
given back over so long
to a rim the sea
asks across,
finding and finding
no thing to keep.The land’s seasons fail
across surface, picked
over the rocks into stippled days.
Downshore, parallels repeat
out of seeing, as dim as far.
Wrack-line and sea’s edge,
limen and littoral hold,
patched and rotted with light.Michael Farley, Lucy’s Ironworks, Stride Publications, 1990
The air has its own grain,
its patterns the eye cannot follow.
Long ago the gulls learned to read
these maps our senses guess at best.
It seems we walk in ways the heart opens,
that the mind cannot follow,
does not even read.
We are blind to our own steps.
God’s arm lies across our shoulders
softer than air itself,
a thing we have no senses for
but strong as death itself.
God’s touch outlasts the act of dying,
remakes stars,
and yet we cannot read it,
only follow
blind to our own heart
that knows as sure as love
what God’s hand says,
loose about our shoulders,
piercèd though with grace.
Michael Farley
In being still
the word dissolves in birdsong,
distant sounds
after harvest –
engines, half-heard voices
across the valley.
The word dissolves –
logos in simple bread,
dark wine -
into the very cells of us.
We grow Christ
within us,
become what we have eaten,
a new and imperceptible birth.
We are not what we thought.
Above us the sky is blue
between clouds,
Mary-dress blue.
It magnifies the Lord,
leads what we could become
up to the swallows’ paths,
criss-crossed with altitude,
hope,
the way back home.
Mike Farley
(written at Hilfield Friary)
The Messenger
by Mary OliverMy work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over how it is
that we live forever.from Thirst, Bloodaxe Books, 2007 (in the UK)
With thanks to Jan of Yearning for God
At five-thirty in the morning I am dreaming a very quiet room
when a soft voice awakens me from my dream.
I am like all mankind awakening from all the dreams
that ever were dreamed in all the nights of the world.
It is like the One Christ awakening in all the separate selves
that ever were separate and isolated and alone in all the lands of the earth.
It is like all minds coming back together into awareness
from all distractions, cross-purposes and confusions,
into unity of love.
It is like the first morning of the world
(when Adam, at the sweet voice of Wisdom
awoke from nonentity and knew her),
and like the Last Morning of the world
when all the fragments of Adam will return from death
at the voice of Hagia Sophia,
and will know where they stand.
Such is the awakening of one man,
one morning,
Awakening out of languor and darkness,
out of helplessness, out of sleep,
newly confronting reality and finding it to be gentleness.
It is like being awakened by Eve.
It is like being awakened by the Blessed Virgin.
It is like coming forth from primordial nothingness
and standing in clarity, in Paradise.
Thomas Merton, with thanks to Barbara
St. Lucy, whose day it is, is patron saint of the blind, which strikes me as somehow appropriate, given a time of year when, as Tom Wright wrote, "All language about the future… is simply a set of signposts pointing into a fog." (Preface to Surprised by Hope)
Maggie Ross has written, at Voice in the Wilderness, another of those posts which you really should go and read in full. I can't do it justice here, but her opening paragraphs will give a feel of why it seem so important to me, this year of all years:
It has been a difficult Advent at so many levels for so many people, yet the human spirit is indomitable.
Here in the UK after weeks of depression a kind of blitz mentality seems to be emerging. Yes, we're poor; yes, there is nothing but uncertainty; yes, the weather's miserable—cold, abysmally dark, wet with a stinging wind—on this day when we celebrate the return of the light (St Lucy's day used to fall at the solstice until the calendar correction of 1582), but there is an irrepressible mirth in the air.
The crowds are out looking and rejoicing, if not buying, and in the covered market holly and tinsel adorn every nook and cranny. The butchers there are in full holiday fig, with every kind of game hanging in the cold air—red deer, pheasant, geese, turkey, duck—and, today, a wild boar. The weather forecasters are becoming increasingly literary and it won't be long until one of them uses "light squibs" in his or her forecast (see below).
Today I came into the library as usual on opening, and as I sat down at my desk under the coffered and brightly painted ceiling of Duke Humfrey's, a brass choir started playing carols out in the Broad. As I write, at this very moment, the skies have opened and the rain has changed from a light drizzle to a torrent, yet the brass choir plays on undeterred, surely a metaphor for our times.
She ends with John Donne's wonderful poem, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day" – it opens:
'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
She was right – it is the poem for this year, somehow… But Tom Wright went on to write, later in the same preface I quoted above, "And – supposing someone came forwards out of the fog to meet us?"
All we can do is wait, and pray, in the fallow time, the between time, when the earth rests on the pivot of the year; of all the years.
