Alan Jacobs

Through the tender mercies of our God
the day-spring from on high hath visited us.
Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee.
Creator of the light,
and Enlightener of the world, —
of the visible light,
The Sun’s ray, a flame of fire,
day and night,
evening and morning, —
of the light invisible,
the revelation of God,
writings of the Law,
oracles of Prophets,
music of Psalms,
instruction of Proverbs,
experience of Histories, —
light which never sets.
God is the Lord who hath shewed us light;
bind the sacrifice with cords,
yea even unto the horns of the altar.
O by Thy resurrection raise us up
unto newness of life,
supplying to us frames of repentance.
The God of peace,
who did bring again from the dead
the great Shepherd of the sheep,
through the blood of the everlasting covenant,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
perfect us in every good work,
to do His will,
working in us what is acceptable before Him,
through Jesus Christ,
to whom be glory for ever.
Thou who didst send down on Thy disciples on this day
Thy Thrice-holy Spirit,
withdraw not Thou the gift, O Lord, from us,
but renew it in its, day by day,
who ask Thee for it.

[translated from the Greek by John Henry Newman]

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?–
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

who lived and died near the Duero

1

When someone wakens with grace, so simple
are the things beside him, they almost
seem new, we almost
feel the judgment, the dark fear
of possession. Our blood
is too thin to pass on the immensity
of someone who loves. The worthiness of this man,
untested, his actions equal
the business of the sea, wave after wave,
both flower and fruit, and death, and birth
at once, and the great hazard
of his tenderness, of his style of walking
the streets, gave us
the one justice: joy.
Like someone in the dark smoking
beside a powder keg, we trailed after him
and,  because he couldn’t say no,
we didn’t see
that he kissed as he drank and though he was cheated
at Blackjack and even worse at Hearts, he played
truly, with unmarked
cards. He, whose business without hours
was companionship, how could
he know his Duero
is a bad neighbor?

2

Roads he took,
to ease his asthma,
the drumrolls he turned to lullabys
although they were the drums of war, laws that cut
man from man,
of which he made graftings to stack his bitter
emptiness not with fury,
less with propaganda,
but with what is most fertile: his simplicity,
all of these fuel for the oven of his seventy-two years.
There everything was fire
flaring up always, burning without ashes
from his wages to his child,
from his white hairs to his hoarse throat,
from his denims to his soul. He stooped
like a lark when he walked, and the measure
of his stride opened a bit, with the air
of one who has carried many loads (so different
from the horseman or the sailor).
His hearing burned out,
smelling of whitewash, sand, wine, tallow,
he went without goodbyes:
all of him a constant coming back.
The winning speed
of his life, his blood
of lizard, of eagle, of dog,
seeped into our bodies like
the music of the road. Blind to the mysterious
and therefore with one eye only
on the actual, rich only in images
and remembered things, how can we now
celebrate what is pure happening,
heroic work, tidings without history?

3

I’m not lowering my head,
Eugenio, and I’m sure
that no one would know me, even at home.
Death is not a river, like the Duero,
neither is it a sea.  Like love, the sea
always ends between four
walls. And you, Eugenio, down a thousand riverbeds
without flood or drought,
without bridges, without women
washing clothes, what water
have you gotten into?
But you’re not given to reflection like water;
you possess, like earth.
And the raw stitches of these streets
of your neighborhood alongside the river,
and the thumb-worn hands of cards,
and this giving a handshake without giving summer
or reality, or life
without danger, and the tongue
gone dumb from saying “goodbye,”“goodbye,”
and the sun a thief slipping off,
and these towers of damp
explosives, the force
lost, and I, with this wind in the beginning of June
crashing in my chest,
and our friends … Much,
so much has ended in a little time.
Uphill or down,
toward the plaza or toward your shop,
everything sneaks a look at us
now, catching us
out of place.
To be alive shames us
a little, it shames us
to breathe, to see how beautifully
the evening ends. But
through the eye of all the world’s locks
your key passes, and it opens
friendly, shining,
and we come home
like someone returning from an appointment fulfilled.
   

[translated by Philip Levine; from Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975,
ed. Hardie St. Martin (New York: Harper, 1976)]

Mary

Oh shut your bright eyes that mine must endanger With their watchfulness: protected by its shade Escape from my care: what can you discover From my tender look but how to be afraid? Love can but confirm the more it would deny. Close your bright eye.

Sleep. What have you learned from the womb that bore you But an anxiety your Father cannot feel? Sleep. What will the flesh that I gave do for you, Or my mother love, but tempt you from His will? Why was I chosen to teach His son to weep? Little one, sleep.

Dream. In human dreams earth ascends to Heaven Where no one need pray nor ever feel alone. In your first hours of life here, O have you Chosen already what death must be your own? How soon will you start on the Sorrowful Way? Dream while you may.

Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly, or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home. It is the rococo of being your own still centre. It is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes: that’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people. Nor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer. Sprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That’s Style. Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen or anyway the fourteenth.

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chain saw. Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal, though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own. Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.

Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings. I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings. Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl - except he didn’t fire them.

Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people (every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it. Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal. If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray asleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins, but not having thrown up: sprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house reinvented the Festoon. Rather it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi, No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding, on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings. An image of my country. And would that it were more so.

No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall. Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind. Reprimanded and dismissed, it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth. Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.

A great deal of the language that is around in the Communion at present seems to presuppose that any change from our current deadlock is impossible, that division is unavoidable and that any such division represents so radical a difference in fundamental faith that no recognition and future co-operation can be imagined.  I cannot accept these assumptions, and I do not believe that as Christians we should see them as beyond challenge, least of all as we think and pray our way through Advent.

The coming of Christ in the flesh and the declaration of the good news of his saving purpose was not a matter of human planning and ingenuity, nor was it frustrated by human resistance and sin.  It was a gift whose reception was made possible by the prayerful obedience of Mary and whose effect was to create a new community of God’s sons and daughters.  As we look forward, what is there for us to do but pray, obey and be ready for God’s re-creating work through the eternal and unchanging Saviour, Jesus Christ?

‘The Spirit and the bride say, “Come”… Amen.  Come Lord Jesus.  The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people.  Amen’ (Rev.22.17, 20-21).

— here

Never forget that you are a son of the King.  — Martin Buber

A year after your death, dear Y.Z., I flew from Houston to San Francisco And remembered our meeting on Third Avenue When we took such a liking to each other. You told me then that as a child you had never seen a forest, Only a brick wall outside a window, And I felt sorry for you because So much disinheritance is our portion. If you were the king’s daughter, you didn’t know it. No fatherland with a castle at the meeting of two rivers, No procession in June in the blue smoke of incense. You were humble and did not ask questions. You shrugged: who after all am I To walk in splendor wearing a myrtle wreath? Fleshly, woundable, pitiable, ironic, You went with men casually, out of unconcern, And smoked as if you were courting cancer. I knew your dream: to have a home With curtains and a flower to be watered in the morning. That dream was to come true, to no avail. And our past moment: the mating of birds Without intent, reflection, nearly airborne Over the splendor of autumn dogwoods and maples; Even in our memory it left hardly a trace. I am grateful, for I learned something from you, Though I haven’t been able to capture it in words: On this earth, where there is no palm and no scepter, Under a sky that rolls up like a tent, Some compassion for us people, some goodness And, simply, tenderness, dear Y. Z.

P.S. Really I am more concerned than words would indicate. I perform a pitiful rite for all of us. I would like everyone to know they are the king’s children And to be sure of their immortal souls, I.e., to believe that what is most their own is imperishable And persists like the things they touch, Now seen by me beyond time’s border: Her comb, her tube of cream, and her lipstick On an extramundane table.

It’s wonderful, there’s nothing else like it, you write in a trance. And the trance is completely addictive, you love it, you want more of it. Once you’ve written the poem and had the trance, polished it and so on, you can go back to the poem and have a trace of that trance, have the shadow of it, but you can’t have it fully again. It seemed to be a knack I discovered as I went along. It’s an integration of the body-mind and the dreaming-mind and the daylight-conscious-mind. All three are firing at once, they’re all in concert. You can be sitting there but inwardly dancing, and the breath and the weight and everything else are involved, you’re fully alive. It takes a while to get into it. You have to have some key, like say a phrase or a few phrases or a subject matter or maybe even a tune to get you started going towards it, and it starts to accumulate. Sometimes it starts without your knowing that you’re getting there, and it builds in your mind like a pressure. I once described it as being like a painless headache, and you know there’s a poem in there, but you have to wait until the words form.

The true disciple is an expectant person, always taking it for granted that there is something about to break through from the master, something about to burst through the ordinary and uncover a new light on the landscape. The master is going to speak or show something; reality is going to open up when you’re in the master’s company and so your awareness (as has often been said by people writing about contemplative prayer) is a little bit like that of a bird-watcher, the experienced bird-watcher, who is sitting still, poised, alert, not tense or fussy, knowing that this is the kind of place where something extraordinary suddenly bursts into view.

I’ve always rather liked that image of prayer as bird-watching. You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long day sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening, and I suspect that most of us know that a lot of our experience of prayer is precisely that. But the odd occasions when you do see what T. S. Eliot called ‘the kingfisher’s wing flashing light to light’ make it all worthwhile. And I think that living in expectancy - living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and your mind sufficiently both slack and attentive to see that when it happens - has a great deal to do with discipleship, indeed with discipleship as the gospels present it to us. Interesting (isn’t it?) that in the gospels the disciples don’t just listen, they’re expected to look as well. They’re people who are picking up clues all the way through.

— Rowan Williams