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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor on Sunday 3 May 2009
"NO OTHER NAME"
So Carol Ann Duffy is the new Poet Laureate. The first woman in 341 years to hold the post which Charles II created with John Dryden as his first laureate. Those of us who value poetry as a way of discerning life’s possibilities and who have already discovered Carol Ann Duffy’s contribution to that discernment will applaud her appointment. And those of us – all of us here I guess – who seek in whatever way we can to inhabit a spiritual reality that gives life its meaning, may find in her work, as in the work of other poets, new resources for our pilgrimage. Poets are not gospel writers but very often, whether they share our beliefs or not, the truthfulness of their perception discloses the gospel to us and brings it alive.
You have, I hope, one of Carol Ann Duffy’s poems in your hands. It’s called “Prayer” and I love it not least because of its final rhyme: juxtaposing prayer with Finisterre – which may sound corny but which conveys meaning (as we shall see) as well as a light touch.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
But most of all I love that poem because it locates the movement of prayer, and the moments of prayer, within the everyday, within the secular, within the mundane, within the fabric of the ordinary. It’s like reading Michel Quoist’s “Prayers of Life” when I was a boy and discovering that even the most ordinary things in our lives could be material for prayer, could open up for us the sense of the other and could bring all heaven before our eyes.
Inevitably Carol Ann Duffy’s poem recalls another poem by George Herbert, which he also called “Prayer” and which you will remember is a kind of shopping list of items, seemingly unrelated suggestions – a bit like our attempts to pray – what St Paul called “our inarticulate groanings”, and given coherence, in Herbert’s case at least, by the discipline of the sonnet form. Our prayer may be given some kind of shape and structure, by the liturgy for example, but within that shape there is an untidy mix of emotion, aspiration, thought and imagination, profound stillness and the daily trivia, domestic chores and important decisions, war and peace picked up from the news or unimportant gossip picked up at the street corner, along with our own pains and shames and un-named fears. “Pray as you can” said the Dominican, Herbert McCabe, which means starting where we are, which is often not in the sacred stillness of the shrine. And it’s very often the poet who recalls us to where we are, to our humanity, and the possibility of God within the predicament of what it is to be human.
“Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer”
Unlike Herbert’s “Prayer”, Carol Ann Duffy’s prayer does not mention God or Christ explicitly: and I have no idea if the idea of God is resourceful to her at all. But in her evocation of what it feels like to be human – listening, seeing, remembering, doing the boring, repetitive, everyday things – she touches something in us – in me at least – that suggests the divine in the human, and justifies the title of the poem – Prayer.
And because Carol Ann Duffy’s “Prayer” does not begin within the narrow confines of religious dogma, or a church building, or a mosque or a synagogue, it can, again like George Herbert’s prayer be generously, if painfully, inclusive. Gethsemane and Calvary, Bethlehem and Jerusalem don’t get or need explicit reference in her poem (and very likely they wouldn’t have occurred to her) but they are there in the poignancy of the contemporary moments she evokes:
“Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts.”
Perhaps that is all that needs to be said – simply to have side by side Carol Ann Duffy’s “Prayer” with our reading from the Acts of the Apostles and our gospel from St John. Maybe those three readings need to be left so that each of us can make whatever connections we may between them.
That certainly is what I love about a poem: when its words have to be inhabited, mulled over, taken away, remembered and repeated, until one day, like a revelation the penny drops and the connections are made and our eyes are opened. That, too, is how I love to read the scriptures: as moments of poetic insight, of human wisdom, of profound connectedness. Not to be used as slogans, or recipes for daily life, or moralising put-downs. We are not the only religious people to use the holy words of scripture like a manifesto rather than as a poem, but I fear we too often do. Or else we turn away from scripture altogether because we fear being branded as fundamentalist.
Today we hear St Peter in Jerusalem after his and John’s arrest on the charge of teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead. Peter stands before his accusers with the man who was formerly crippled, who sat day by day by the Beautiful Gate begging. This man Peter has restored to health, and pointing to him Peter says (as we have heard earlier): “This man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.” And Peter continues to draw the conclusion from his own experience of the risen Christ and from the healing of the cripple which they have all witnessed: “There is salvation in no-one else, for there is no other name under heaven, given among mortals by which we must be saved.”
Week by week on these Sundays after Easter, we are reading the accounts from the Acts of the Apostles of how the first disciples of Jesus, witnesses of his resurrection and transformed by the movement of the Holy Spirit among them, began to put into practice the ministry of healing and love and proclamation of the kingdom which Jesus himself had exercised. And this healing of the cripple at the Beautiful Gate and Peter’s subsequent proclamation of the faith that is in him are amongst the most beautiful and stirring stories in the New Testament. But how easily this beautiful and stirring story can be taken as a slogan or a tract. How easily the revelation of the power of God in human lives can become a narrow and excluding agenda. How easily the proclamation of the Kingdom of God can become (has so often become), the narrowing of our horizons, and the arrogant assumption that there are limits to God’s grace and we know what those limits are.
Yes, the Christian life involves choices and demands as well as life-giving joy – as those who were confirmed here last night were left in no doubt. Yes, Jesus Christ is the one through whom we are ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. Yes, our sense of God and our hope of heaven intimately relates to our proclamation of the risen Christ, known among us and celebrated here day by day and week by week.
But no – the Christian proclamation which began at Easter was not a narrow confession – and every attempt to confine the Spirit of Pentecost was resisted, as men and women then as now had to discover for themselves (though thank God in company with others) the name that is above all names: and find that we are travelling along a road with many seekers after truth, who may be poets or followers of another religion.
We need to read the Christian scriptures like a poem, not a manifesto. If we are to find for ourselves the name by which we must be saved, then we must take that name and the story that hangs upon it, inhabit it, mull it over, take it away, remember it and repeat it – here or there or in the stillness of our hearts, until like a revelation, the penny drops, the connections are made, and our eyes are opened.
And one final point about Herbert and Carol Ann Duffy, which may not be irrelevant to our gospel understanding. George Herbert’s poem “Prayer” is the only poem in the English language that I know that doesn’t have a main verb. It’s as though his shopping list of prayerful intentions is waiting for the “something understood” – the verb, the verbum, the Word which alone makes sense of our inarticulate groaning. And Carol Anne Duffy ends her “Prayer” with that throwaway couplet that brings us back to earth:
“Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.”
But Finisterre is not simply a convenient rhyme: it is also land’s end, the edge of the universe, the beyond where prayer becomes real and God is made known.
Sometimes it’s a poem that opens our eyes and the penny drops.
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You have, I hope, one of Carol Ann Duffy’s poems in your hands. It’s called “Prayer” and I love it not least because of its final rhyme: juxtaposing prayer with Finisterre – which may sound corny but which conveys meaning (as we shall see) as well as a light touch.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
But most of all I love that poem because it locates the movement of prayer, and the moments of prayer, within the everyday, within the secular, within the mundane, within the fabric of the ordinary. It’s like reading Michel Quoist’s “Prayers of Life” when I was a boy and discovering that even the most ordinary things in our lives could be material for prayer, could open up for us the sense of the other and could bring all heaven before our eyes.
Inevitably Carol Ann Duffy’s poem recalls another poem by George Herbert, which he also called “Prayer” and which you will remember is a kind of shopping list of items, seemingly unrelated suggestions – a bit like our attempts to pray – what St Paul called “our inarticulate groanings”, and given coherence, in Herbert’s case at least, by the discipline of the sonnet form. Our prayer may be given some kind of shape and structure, by the liturgy for example, but within that shape there is an untidy mix of emotion, aspiration, thought and imagination, profound stillness and the daily trivia, domestic chores and important decisions, war and peace picked up from the news or unimportant gossip picked up at the street corner, along with our own pains and shames and un-named fears. “Pray as you can” said the Dominican, Herbert McCabe, which means starting where we are, which is often not in the sacred stillness of the shrine. And it’s very often the poet who recalls us to where we are, to our humanity, and the possibility of God within the predicament of what it is to be human.
“Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer”
Unlike Herbert’s “Prayer”, Carol Ann Duffy’s prayer does not mention God or Christ explicitly: and I have no idea if the idea of God is resourceful to her at all. But in her evocation of what it feels like to be human – listening, seeing, remembering, doing the boring, repetitive, everyday things – she touches something in us – in me at least – that suggests the divine in the human, and justifies the title of the poem – Prayer.
And because Carol Ann Duffy’s “Prayer” does not begin within the narrow confines of religious dogma, or a church building, or a mosque or a synagogue, it can, again like George Herbert’s prayer be generously, if painfully, inclusive. Gethsemane and Calvary, Bethlehem and Jerusalem don’t get or need explicit reference in her poem (and very likely they wouldn’t have occurred to her) but they are there in the poignancy of the contemporary moments she evokes:
“Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts.”
Perhaps that is all that needs to be said – simply to have side by side Carol Ann Duffy’s “Prayer” with our reading from the Acts of the Apostles and our gospel from St John. Maybe those three readings need to be left so that each of us can make whatever connections we may between them.
That certainly is what I love about a poem: when its words have to be inhabited, mulled over, taken away, remembered and repeated, until one day, like a revelation the penny drops and the connections are made and our eyes are opened. That, too, is how I love to read the scriptures: as moments of poetic insight, of human wisdom, of profound connectedness. Not to be used as slogans, or recipes for daily life, or moralising put-downs. We are not the only religious people to use the holy words of scripture like a manifesto rather than as a poem, but I fear we too often do. Or else we turn away from scripture altogether because we fear being branded as fundamentalist.
Today we hear St Peter in Jerusalem after his and John’s arrest on the charge of teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead. Peter stands before his accusers with the man who was formerly crippled, who sat day by day by the Beautiful Gate begging. This man Peter has restored to health, and pointing to him Peter says (as we have heard earlier): “This man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.” And Peter continues to draw the conclusion from his own experience of the risen Christ and from the healing of the cripple which they have all witnessed: “There is salvation in no-one else, for there is no other name under heaven, given among mortals by which we must be saved.”
Week by week on these Sundays after Easter, we are reading the accounts from the Acts of the Apostles of how the first disciples of Jesus, witnesses of his resurrection and transformed by the movement of the Holy Spirit among them, began to put into practice the ministry of healing and love and proclamation of the kingdom which Jesus himself had exercised. And this healing of the cripple at the Beautiful Gate and Peter’s subsequent proclamation of the faith that is in him are amongst the most beautiful and stirring stories in the New Testament. But how easily this beautiful and stirring story can be taken as a slogan or a tract. How easily the revelation of the power of God in human lives can become a narrow and excluding agenda. How easily the proclamation of the Kingdom of God can become (has so often become), the narrowing of our horizons, and the arrogant assumption that there are limits to God’s grace and we know what those limits are.
Yes, the Christian life involves choices and demands as well as life-giving joy – as those who were confirmed here last night were left in no doubt. Yes, Jesus Christ is the one through whom we are ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. Yes, our sense of God and our hope of heaven intimately relates to our proclamation of the risen Christ, known among us and celebrated here day by day and week by week.
But no – the Christian proclamation which began at Easter was not a narrow confession – and every attempt to confine the Spirit of Pentecost was resisted, as men and women then as now had to discover for themselves (though thank God in company with others) the name that is above all names: and find that we are travelling along a road with many seekers after truth, who may be poets or followers of another religion.
We need to read the Christian scriptures like a poem, not a manifesto. If we are to find for ourselves the name by which we must be saved, then we must take that name and the story that hangs upon it, inhabit it, mull it over, take it away, remember it and repeat it – here or there or in the stillness of our hearts, until like a revelation, the penny drops, the connections are made, and our eyes are opened.
And one final point about Herbert and Carol Ann Duffy, which may not be irrelevant to our gospel understanding. George Herbert’s poem “Prayer” is the only poem in the English language that I know that doesn’t have a main verb. It’s as though his shopping list of prayerful intentions is waiting for the “something understood” – the verb, the verbum, the Word which alone makes sense of our inarticulate groaning. And Carol Anne Duffy ends her “Prayer” with that throwaway couplet that brings us back to earth:
“Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.”
But Finisterre is not simply a convenient rhyme: it is also land’s end, the edge of the universe, the beyond where prayer becomes real and God is made known.
Sometimes it’s a poem that opens our eyes and the penny drops.