Don’t open it!
Don’t open it! But if course, being Contrary, I did, and out flew …
EVERYTHING!!!!
(You might, not unreasonably, believe this space too small for everything, but you would be mistaken.
Everything was once very, very small indeed)
Look!
Here’s my father, toiling up the pitch with a battered tin chest strapped to his push bike.
Bought at the Auction for two shillings –
Hiding all kinds of junk, and a Bible THIS big
Written, it says, by King James.
My father – Who art now in heaven, hallowed be his name -left me his blue eyes, and this smile …
My mother, she threw away the bobbins and the bits of things.
Then, in her best school writing, with a black biro,
Inscribed beneath the Copperplate of William Williams, the names of everyone she loved and had given birth to, and then – too soon – I wrote for her:
Gertrude Ellen Cook nee Pitt 1927 – 2002.
Listen!
It’s 1985. The pudgy hand of my beautiful Katy reaches out from her pram
Bats the line of bluebirds strung out in reach and squeals with laughter. We all laugh.
Imagine!
A round box. Carved from Canadian maple.
So old it must be coaxed into opening.
Take care lest you spill a teaspoonful of sand from the shores of Lake Huron,
A few tiny shells, and an anklet that I never wear.
Here’s a story I won’t tell unless, when we are all gone and I am too old to care,
I whisper it to my granddaughter – or my priest.
Box! I guess you get out of it whatever you put in.
My friend Alex, who featured a few posts ago, is starting an ‘Outdoor Church’ which means he is taking Holy Communion into Gloucester Park today, for Christians on the margins, who don’t feel comfortable in buildings.
There are a thousand -and – one Canon Laws he is breaking, I’m glad to say. (She who sees what Canon Law has turned the Body of Christ into, and thinks its time a few were broken.) He’s going to be a priest one day, so I guess he needs to get this rule-breaking out of his system, though personally, I think he should stick with it. No good asking me to conform, I’m over sixty, on the last lap, and don’t much care what I do these days, as long it’s … Well, no matter.
Anyway, Alex asked me to preach today at Outdoor Church. Going with my reckless tendency to say ‘yes’ to practically anything, I agreed. He’s asked me to speak for five minutes on ‘The Holy Spirit’. I laughed!
Then I wrote, and this is what arrived.
Alex, I should have said,
I am not a preacher-
I’m a poet!
My job is to creep in under your armour
Rip away at what you think you believe
And help you to find who you really are.
Listen!
Where the Spirit of The Lord Is THERE IS FREEDOM
The Kingdom of God is not over here or over there
But tucked away within you
And WHO is it who occupies your soul
Your, my,
Hope of Glory?
The Christ, of course, you whisper, into the silence.
Go then. To Him.
Take up your freedom
Lay down your wanting of empty things
Go dig within for the pearl you sold you land for!
You WILL FIND HIM
Welling up from beneath your heart
Inviting you to dance or to weep
Calling you quietly
Insistently
To your deepest Being
And your highest Self.
One hundred and forty-three words. One minute’s worth of a lifetime’s experience. It’ll do.
My friend Wendy and I know A LOT about much that would be of little interest to most people, and were confidant enough to put our knowledge to the test at the Monday Night Quiz at The Jolly Brewmaster, which is a nice little pub off the Bath Road in Cheltenham. Sometimes we came first, usually when we’d managed to dredge up from somewhere the winner of the Belgian Grand Prix in 1985, or the identity of the current possessor-Continent of the Ryder Cup.
History and Literature we aced, Geography we were about as good as anyone else at, it was always Sport that proved our Achilles Heel. (Yes, we know our Greek Mythology too.) However, it was a lot of fun, and for a while there, we were the team to beat. (A very short while, I add, in the interests of veracity.)
Between sipping our wine, adressing the sartorial short-comings of our fellow drinkers, and putting the world to rights, Wendy and I would find a few minutes to be thankful.
I suppose being thankful is more usually considered to be an activity reserved for churches. Nevertheless, we made time for it because we were in the mood, and secular gratitude is as good for you as the sacred kind. I expect you are wondering what we were grateful FOR, and as you have borne patiently with me this far, I am going to get all serious on you and let you know.
We were thankful that we live in a society where we, two women could walk safely in the streets at night, sit down in a pub and compete in an intellectual exercise on equal terms with men. We were grateful for the past struggles of others that meant that we had grown up without the fear of illness or hunger. We were indebted too, for safe childbirth and flushing toilets, and a thousand other things of greater or lesser importance in the wider scheme of things.
We didn’t always like the government, but appreciated the fact that it wasn’t going to throw us into prison for what we thought. We are indifferently religious, on aggragate, and celebrated the fact that we didn’t have to conform to anybody else’s notions of right of wrong, and did not have someone else’s beliefs and practises foisted on us if we chose to ignore them.
I guess History (with a capital H) teaches us to take a longer view. Two hundred years ago, our lives would have been very different. After all, it’s not so long ago that women were chattels, no more than wombs handed on from father to husband with an unthinking disregard for individual rights.
If I try to carry on, I shall get flustered, and lose sight of any point. I’m trying to make, which is anyway, made better by Stephen Pinker. Things were bad, and in many places still are, but there IS an evolution in human consciousness that is making them better.
Commonplace injusticies of the past are unthinkable now. At least here, in England, today. Our British history teaches that subject peoples who do not own even themselves, can, with courage, tenacity and perseverance, win through to freedom. The proof of it is here: two free, independent-minded, feisty women sitting in a pub with a glass of wine pitting their fading wits against others on equal terms, and, occasionally, winning.
Dancing Across The Cosmos 