Words on hold

It’s revealing what gets stuck
Year on year
In the sluice gate

All that mudded water
Redirected, ruining houses
Built on flood plains

Whilst broken chairs
Like erupted bones
Splinter the angry stream

Or logs and small trees,
Held up, banging themselves
Hard against the grill

No space left
For the flow of words
A heart clogged

With jagged splinters
The grist, you’d think
But not today

Today, whatever
Grain is being milled
Out of sight and sound

Is a quiet day
For picking out the debris
One piece at a time

9pm: My triste:

The back garden slatted bench
Two ice cubes and a
Cut glass swill of American whiskey
In my cold right-hand
And in my other
A warming medium-sized
Henri Winterman’s

Welcome

It’s quiet and best taken in
With eyes closed
A crow with a single squark
Has made his journey from the moon
Hiding behind the wood
And the river of cars
Add to the whisper of the trees

I wonder if hidden Russian or Ukrainian
Or Israeli or Hamas fighters
Are listening also to chattering leaves
It’s too early for cats to squeal
Radiators and fires
In my neighbours’ houses
Prove irresistible

It’s too early also for constellations
Just three pin-point stars
Watching over the Earth
All the skylarks, blackbirds, sparrows
Are down; it’s the time
For bats to break the speed limit
Of the encroaching night

Welcome

I exhale a cloud of sweet-smelling
Incense my conversational
Prayers ascending
Carried into the trees
By the Spirit
To heaven all around us
So close

Pause

Warmed internally as I am
By the golden whiskey
My tongue on fire
I feel the God of the bible is close
God who makes all wars to cease
And I wonder how?
Maybe I should only wonder when?

These sensory minutes
Slowed by thoughts and longings
Lead me to feel
Yes, the hard bench, but far more:
Peace, tangible goodness
Pressing down into us all
If we would stop and look up

Discerning the present call of God

Prophets in the Old Testament had a dual role.

Firstly, they call the people back to obedience to the Law of Moses (Gal3v17) and faith in the Old Covenant promises given to Abraham (Gen 12v1-3).

Secondly, they announced the word of God to their generation, or individuals, and this often included divinely revealed knowledge of the future so that they could move the people into a greater revelation of God’s purposes, in particular, pointing towards the time when God would inaugurate a New Covenant era through the sufferings of the Messiah and the pouring out of the Spirit.

prophets continue to call the people back to the gospel

We are now living in that New Covenant era and prophets continue to call the people back to the gospel, back to faith in the promises of God contained in the New Covenant (e.g. Jer 31 v 31-34 /Hebrews 10v16 and Ez 11v19/36v26-27) and to call the people forward into the purposes of God.

This article aims to follow on in this vein.

…and to call the people forward into the purposes of God

In England, the battle to establish true Christianity free from State control and interference is described very well in E.H. Broadbent’s book The Pilgrim Church.

John Wesley and George Whitfield were such prophets, calling the people back to the gospel and forward in the purposes of God, and playing their role, along with many other preachers, in establishing many churches.

It is a gross simplification to look back at John Wesley and George Whitfield as the sole pioneers of a recovery of genuine Christianity in England, but something was stirring as a small group of students began to meet at Oxford University in 1729. Wesley and Whitfield rediscovered that salvation is by grace – a free gift – and through faith in what Christ has done on the cross rather than attempting to produce a Christlike life through good works and religious observance.

Preaching salvation by faith, and the need to be born again, caused an uproar and many churches closed their doors to Wesley and Whitfield and others preaching the same message…hence the thousands that came to hear them preach in the open air.

As their numbers grew, ‘evangelical Christianity’ found greater degrees of toleration in England through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many well-known denominations are now either completely ‘evangelical’ in their theology or have significant proportions of their members who sail under that banner: Methodists, Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals, and many Presbyterian churches to name a few.

Prophets such as Wesley, Whitfield, Seymour, and the pioneers of the Charismatic Renewal churches in our day fulfilled their mission to call the people back to the New Covenant and call the people forward in the purposes of God.

Then, in 1906, William J Seymour, a one-eyed black preacher in Los Angeles started preaching that, subsequent to receiving the gift of salvation, there is a baptism in the Spirit and that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are part and parcel of the New Covenant and should be operating in the church today. Meetings in Azusa Street became almost a re-run of Acts 2 at Pentecost. As a result, Seymour and others were regularly banned from preaching in many evangelical churches and were forced to form their own denomination – called the Pentecostal church. From that starting point, the movement of the Holy Spirit began to spawn revivals such as the Welsh revival of 1904 and affect historic denominations through Fountain Trust Meetings in England in the 1960s.

As a result, what became known as ‘Charismatic Renewal’ was born with thousands of believers in hundreds of denominational churches experiencing the baptism of the Spirit and receiving gifts of the Spirit such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, and words of knowledge. As a result, when those preaching the message of Charismatic Renewal were rejected, as many were, new churches were formed such as New Frontiers, Salt and Light, Kingdom Faith, Vineyard and so on. Some churches in the more historic denominations also welcomed the renewal and restoration of the gifts of the Spirit.

The above two major rediscoveries had always been contained in the New Covenant as prophesied by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and embodied in Jesus. It was Jesus who preached that we must be born again by the Spirit of God and commanded the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the baptism of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Prophets such as Wesley, Whitfield, Seymour, and the pioneers of the Charismatic Renewal churches in our day fulfilled their mission to call the people back to the New Covenant and call the people forward in the purposes of God.

What about now? Where are we?

The following three short articles will look at:

1. The three feasts of Israel – Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles

2. Who died on the cross?

3. Rachel dying in childbirth

Firstly, Tabernacles.

Jews celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles by gathering under ‘booths’ to break bread and drink wine, to remember their journey through the wilderness living in tents (tabernacles). These days it will often be small family groups that meet under a roof made from the overlapping branches of four types of palm trees. There are gaps between the branches to let the light in…open to the heavens. The feast is prophetic – pointing to the New Testament era i.e. not only for the ‘sojourning’ aspect of our time here on Earth before Resurrection and glory – but of the reality of the New Covenant in the present age. There is a ‘here and now’ dimension that has not previously been seen or taught as integral to the new covenant in the same way that Passover and Pentecost have been rediscovered.

As with Passover and Pentecost, the first fulfilment of Tabernacles is located in Jesus. He was the Lamb of God (Passover) and the Spirit was upon Him (Pentecost). But in John’s gospel we read ‘the Word became flesh and tabernacled (Tabernacles)among us and we beheld His glory’ John 1 v 14.

The church, in Christ, is therefore to be an expression of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles.

When the church gathers, the body of Christ, we teach that Christ as the Passover Lamb has dealt with our sins and set us free, and that Jesus will baptise us with the Spirit as at Pentecost, and the Spirit manifests His presence in gifts and ministries, but we also gather together under a roof that lets the light and the glory in; Tabernacles is fulfilled in the church. Denominational barriers boundaries and cannot stand in the glory and the light as the body of Christ comes together and lives and moves in His light and glory, just as Jesus lived.

Secondly, moving on from Romans 1-5 churches

Romans 1-5 is a wonderful series of logical arguments that describe the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ on the cross, i.e. Christ died in my place, He died for me, taking the punishment I deserved and so securing salvation by grace not by my works, through faith. Once I ‘see’ or believe that Christ took my sins on the cross, I can believe in God’s love for me and His forgiveness, reconciliation, justification, salvation that is all offered to all as a free gift to be received. We ‘repent’ of trying to live the Christian life under our own government and we receive the gifts of salvation, righteousness and eternal life and are restored to a relationship with God our Heavenly Father. This is, of course, wonderful ‘good news’ (the meaning of the word ‘gospel’) and many lives have been transformed simply by that revelation and encounter.

Romans 5 starts with ‘Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ and ends with ‘so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’. There is only one reference to the Holy Spirit, He is introduced more fully in Romans 8.

And so, evangelical churches preach Romans 1-5 with faith and charismatic churches go further and incorporate the teaching in Romans 8 and elsewhere on the present ministry of the Holy Spirit as a consequence of receiving the baptism in the Spirit.

But in Romans 6 Paul poses a question to which many evangelical and charismatic believers would have to answer with a ‘No’.

‘Do you not know that as many of us as were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death…knowing this that our old man was crucified with Him…now if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him’

Similarly in Galatians 2 v 20

‘I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me; the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me’

Or Colossians 3 v 3

‘For you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God…’

The clear teaching of the New Testament is that the death of Christ was not only substitutionary but inclusive…it included you and me.

Lastly, let us consider Rachel.

‘When they were very close to Ephrath, Rachel laboured in childbirth, and she had hard labour…the midwife told her ‘Do not be afraid; you will have this son’ and so it was that as her soul was departing (for she died) that she called his name Ben-Oni, but his father called him Benjamin’

Ben-oni means ‘son of my sorrow’ whereas Benjamin means ‘son of my right hand’.

Isaiah prophesied that the coming Messiah would be a ‘Man of sorrows acquainted with grief’ Is 53 v 3 but now ‘is exalted at the right hand of God’ Acts 2v33. These twin attributes of Benjamin, Christ-like suffering and glory, serve as a prophetic sign and description of Christ and therefore of His body, the church. But for Benjamin to be born into the world Rachel – who had previously cried out to Jacob, ‘Give me children or I die’ (Gen 30v1) - had to die in childbirth. As much as Benjamin can be thought of as a prophetic image of the church to come, the preceding Rachel generation has to die. It is her calling. Rachel suffered a physical death so that physical Benjamin could be born, for the ‘Benjamin-church’ to emerge we must be willing to ‘die to’ our present pattern when it is time to move on:

Jesus said ‘Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it produces much grain’ John 12 v 24

For Abram to become the father of many nations, for his descendants to become as the sand on the seashore or as the stars in the sky he had, first of all, to leave his father’s house. The call of God upon us is the same. Not to settle. We should be thankful and honouring to all those that pioneered before, nevertheless, we must press on from Passover and Pentecost to Tabernacles, where the ‘Word became flesh and tabernacled among us and we beheld His glory’, as in Christ, now in the church-in-union-with-Christ.

Our Rachel-like call is summed up in St Paul’s words to the Galatians: ‘My little children, for whom I labour in childbirth again until Christ is formed in you’.

Specific answers to questions on matters like church government are not within the scope of this article, except to say that just as our heads coordinate everything our bodies do, Jesus as the head of the body of Christ, isn’t disconnected from His body, but coordinates everything His body does. The Spirit of God is in labour in us bringing to birth what may be called a Benjamin-generation-church, one that knows sorrow and glory in a different way than Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have known, or their predecessors in Evangelical churches.

These churches will preach Passover - the forgiveness of sins and deliverance from slavery of sin - and Pentecost - the baptism and power of the Spirit. And Tabernacles. They will know what it is to meet and function in the light and glory of God fellowshipping in Christ’s sufferings and His glory. The leaders and those born again under their ministry will know that when Christ died, they died, they were crucified with Christ and are now raised in Him as new creations. ‘Christ is your life’ is a fact not the statement of a particularly enthusiastic Christian but the New Testament norm.

Prophets call the people back to covenant promises and obedience to the word when they stray. They also carry the present and future work of God stirring in their hearts, like a pregnant woman carrying a baby yet to be born.

In this article, I have tried to follow suit. I hear that call to press on to Tabernacles. To call the church back to her pioneering Abrahamic faith; to leave our father’s house and be led by God to a place He will show us. And to be willing to die in childbirth, like Rachel, to suffer in childbirth like the apostle Paul, or to go into the ground like the seed, in order for a Passover-Pentecostal-Tabernacles church to be born in which the twin attributes of Ben-omi and Benjamin, suffering and glory, are evident.

Paris ’24 – 17th April 2024

With just 100 days to go before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games 2024 in Paris, it must be time for another blog post.

The 10K Final is scheduled for Friday, August 2nd 2024 at 9.20pm

Why mention this?

As I am running 5Ks at just over the 10K qualifying time of 27:28 I have a new aim…to run a 10K on August 2nd, the same day as those gazelles of the athletic world, go home, shower and then watch to see the elite storm home in less than 63 seconds per 400m laps.

if one aims at nothing, one is sure to succeed

Also, the 10K world record stands at 26:11 care of Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei…that shall now be my aim for running Parkrun 5Ks. Not easy, my pb is about a minute slower than Joshua Cheptegei’s 10K record!

But if one aims at nothing, one is sure to succeed.

Today’s 5K on Bristol Downs, a gentle jog after cramp 6:17 per km, just over 30 mins for 5K, so there’s a way to go.

But with my new Brooke’s trainers and a following wind…who knows?

My aim - 26:11 for 5K

The Case for renaming Easter Saturday

Easter Saturday needs a facelift. It’s the forgotten day. The quiet day between Good Friday, a holiday for many, and Easter Sunday.

If we look past Good Friday, Easter eggs, egg hunts, and the like, we know what is there: the crucifixion of the Messiah, Jesus, and on Easter Sunday, an empty tomb and the appearances of the resurrected Jesus, first as a gardener to Mary Magdalene, then to his disciples, and then to the two disciples on their forlorn, hope-shattered walk, to Emmaus.

My story is that I abandoned the agnosticism of my teenage years for faith in Christ. For me, the moment of belief was a moment, an instant of time, as I intoned the Creed ‘I believe in God…’ which, up until that point I had stopped repeating as I did not believe. But my arguments against Christianity had been eroded over a period of a year or two having carefully considered the compelling evidence supporting the historicity of the New Testament and for the resurrection.

I had accepted that Jesus was a true historical figure and that the New Testament was a reliable document and was certain that the disciples were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ crucifixion and were convinced that He had risen from the dead. But there is still an immense gulf between believing historical facts and making a personal commitment to follow Christ.

As a young child, I was always struck by the simplicity of Jesus’ invitation to the disciples: ‘Come, follow Me. And they left their nets and followed Him’. Now, I was faced with the same choice.

As I said those words ‘I believe…’ I found to my astonishment that I did.

On Easter Sundays, I am reminded that Jesus overcame death, as He said He would, appeared to His disbelieving disciples, and ate fish to prove that He wasn’t a ghost, or a figment of their imagination. That they took some convincing was further evidence to me that the New Testament was an honest account of the events of that day. None of the apostles are shown in a flattering light; they all abandoned Him when He was arrested, and none believed in the resurrection without a fight!

But all this leaves Easter Saturday.

The Jewish day starts and finishes at sunset, so to be true to the New Testament, Jesus died at 3pm on Good Friday, and His body was placed in the tomb in the evening. The Sabbath, Saturday, started at sunset and lasted through to the following sunset. On Sunday, just after dawn, on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other women went to the tomb and found it empty, followed by Peter and John. Jesus then appeared to the women, the men, and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The third day.

None of the apostles are shown in a flattering light; they all abandoned Him when He was arrested, and none believed in the resurrection without a fight!

What happened on the Sabbath? Was Jesus ‘asleep’?

When I said the Creed, there was one line that mystified me:

was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;

Descended into hell? Really? What does this mean? Is there any evidence in the New Testament to support this? How was this phrase included in the Creed? Why do various more modern versions either delete this sentence or retranslate it as ‘descended to the dead’? Is this descent referring to Good Friday i.e. experienced by Jesus on the cross as part of His suffering, or after His death and before His resurrection – i.e. during the Saturday? Questions. Questions.

There are interpretations aplenty. Look at the following article for a detailed biblical analysis  (e.g. 102-04_303.pdf (biblicalstudies.org.uk) )

One of the issues for us is the use of metaphor and spiritual language alongside the more familiar vocabulary of our three-dimensional material world. Good Friday and, to some extent, Easter Sunday, can be analysed ‘materially’, on Friday Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. On Sunday, he appeared albeit differently, but physically to the disciples. For Easter Saturday, however, the normal material tools at our disposal, are of no use. The body is in the tomb, hidden from view – the New Testament clearly states that Jesus rose on the third day, that is after sunset on the Sabbath, Saturday, and before dawn on Sunday.

For the materialist, then, relevant questions about ‘descending into hell’ include what is meant by the term ‘hell’, where is it located, and when exactly did Jesus descend there?

Spiritual thinkers, on the other hand, look beyond the physical events e.g. the arrest, the nails, the blood, the death, and the physical suffering, to consider the significance of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God in heavenly realms.

·        Material interpretation – ‘hell’ refers to the realm of the dead i.e. Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek rather than Gehenna – the place of judgement and fire. This explains why many modern versions of the Apostles’ Creed replace the rather ambiguous word ‘hell’ with ‘the dead’.

·        Spiritual interpretation – the spiritual agonies Jesus suffered on the cross were as real as the physical. When He cried out ‘My God! My God! Why have you forsaken/abandoned me?’ He suffered the ultimate darkness of separation from His heavenly Father, taking our sins upon Himself, and descending into hell, for us.

So…if called upon to recite the Apostles’ Creed, I can still repeat ‘he descended into hell’. Had he not descended into hell, He would have avoided taking upon Himself the fulness of the spiritual suffering in the human race, infected, as we all are, with sin, so that we may be forgiven. And there is a more profound truth to be found in the crucifixion, we are included and taken into the death of Christ as Paul states ‘I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me’. Christ not only took our sins so that we could be forgiven, but took us on the cross, so we could be delivered and made into new creations, replicas of Christ.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty…

In doing so, He opened up the way for God to raise us up, just as God raised Jesus from the dead. Not something we can achieve by ourselves, by any ‘religious’ or moral efforts of our own.

Two criminals were crucified with Jesus, on either side. Initially they both ‘reviled Him’ but the thief later changed his tune and said to Jesus: ‘Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with Me in paradise’. The destiny of the other criminal is less certain. Like with the early disciples, Jesus says ‘Come, follow Me’. It will never become more complicated than this. Leave everything and follow Him.

Physically Jesus died and descended into hell (the place of the dead) but, spiritually, He turned hell into paradise (a beautiful garden) for Himself and the thief. Perhaps we should rename Easter Saturday ‘Paradise Saturday’?

I’ll leave the last word on this to St Paul:

‘Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God…made Himself of no reputation…and being found in the appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of the earth, and under the earth, that every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.’  Philippians 2 v 6-11

Book Review: Home by Marilynne Robinson

This may as well serve as a double review; Home is the sequel to Gilead and so the setting, a fictional small town in Iowa, Gilead, and the principal characters remain the same.

In Home, the outlier of family, Jack Boughton, returns to live with his aging father, the retired church pastor, Reverend Robert Boughton, and his younger sister, Gloria.

Whereas Gilead’s narrator is Reverend John Ames, a lifelong friend of Reverend Boughton, and revolves around a series of letters written to his godson, Jack Boughton, Home is written in the third person and the action takes place almost entirely within the four walls of the Boughton’s house.

In some ways, this is a re-telling of the parable of the prodigal son. Like Gilead, Home is steeped in scripture and faith-related issues. Jack as a wayward youth, often in trouble with the law, now returns, his battles with alcohol unresolved, as is his family life, and faith. Will he, like the prodigal of Luke’s gospel ‘come to his senses’ and return home in a deeper way than merely geographically?

But the impact of Home for me was one of extraordinary attention to the minute detail of moods, tensions, fear of precedents, hope and disappointments, and moral dilemmas that the author, Marilynne Robinson brings to bear in Home page after page.

It’s a slow burn. Its major emotion is sadness

There are no chapter divisions – it is one long dive into the tension between old Reverend Boughton and his son Jack as they co-exist with Gloria, under one roof. In one sense they are deeply united and tender with each other, and yet there is a constant struggle to close the gap between father and son.

It’s a slow burn. Its major emotion is sadness.

So, why read Home? Why not read a good detective novel where, even if the detective is gravely flawed, you know the crime will be solved? Or a spy novel full of action and courage? Home is a blues novel, left, largely, on persistently unresolved blues notes. It does contain courage but its examination of brokenness includes failure as well as degrees of success.

So, why read it? Because it is brilliantly written.

Leaving the Ninety-Nine

The Road to Emmaus – Luke 24.

It takes about 3 hours to walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. If Cleopas and his friend, the two disciples, took an occasional break, maybe 4 hours might be nearer, but not much more than that.

If the day was ‘far spent’ by the time they and Jesus, who had appeared to them in some form of resurrection disguise it was about 7pm when they arrived in Emmaus.

After a short while at the table sharing food with Jesus, who promptly disappeared as they broke bread, they made their way back to Jerusalem, ‘they rose up that very hour’, arriving at the earliest by 9pm.

The precise location of Emmaus is unknown. Recent excavations at and near Abu-Gosh lend support for this site but there is also a Roman Catholic Franciscan church in Al-Qubeiba that celebrates Luke 24 each year. Evidence for this site is restricted to the remnants of Roman paving slabs.

The point of writing about Emmaus is that these two sites are located on the West Bank in what we often refer to as the Palestinian territories as distinct from Israel.

Gaza and the West Bank are where a diminishing number of Palestinian Christians live, their hope almost broken and shattered by a combination of poor economic conditions and persecution by hard-line fundamentalist Muslims, conditions which have forced many to emigrate.

The Palestinian Christian diaspora is part of the tragedy of the Middle East but…

…just as Jesus left the 120 in Jerusalem in search of the 2 on the road, thus literally acting out the ‘leaving the 99’ parable, neither can we, who have Christ dwelling in us, not be impelled to leave the relative comforts of where we are to search for those whose hopes, built up in Jesus maybe from childhood, have been torn to shreds by life’s events or the prevailing pressure of society.

We will find ourselves, just like Jesus, in some unlikely places, breaking bread with those whose faith and hope in Jesus has been all but broken, and yet leaving them with ‘hearts burning’ as we speak about Jesus the Messiah so that they too ‘rise up that very hour’, faith restored, hope restored and make their way, like Cleopas, to meet the resurrected Jesus.

Not a typical Friday

An alarm set for 6…ignored
Late now, stumbling, unshaven
Quick scrape with blade
Hot water on the face
Heart rate up, face the day

Walk through woods
Holding trousers up
Away from the mud
Bit sweaty reaching W-o-T
Early now, waiting for lift

Knocking mud from boots
Saying my prayers
Lift late, lift arrives
We speak, she with peppermint tea
I fumbling with mobile and rucksack

I’m unloaded
And find a Costa
Sup a flat white
Try not to get sticky fingers
Breakfast is a blueberry muffin

Was late, then early
Now waiting
Strange how unaccustomed to time
We clock people are
Perhaps more suited to eternity?

Have an hour to kill
Not listening to others’ talk
A man says have a nice day
Maybe too often and to strangers
Maybe waiting a lifetime for a nice day

We all shed clues
Our inner man
Incapable of hiding
A slight frown, or
Eyes full of music

That’s it…
I contend we are all
Musical instruments
Being played by a
Divine hand, different moods

Not a typical Friday
My time register and
Soul duly tuned, will it be
An atonal Shostakovich day
Discordant or…

An exultant symphony
Lifting us up, opening the heart
Believing one can…
At last…
Love one’s neighbour as oneself?

Extra

My friend Jon used to pass me
John, his torn open
Tube of extra strong mints
And I, worrying about halitosis
Would smile meekly
And prise from the flayed opening
The white disc of crumbling
Sinus-clearing mint

Unlike Polos
That can be sucked to
A nanometer before
Cracking on a warm tongue
Extrastrongs seem to demand
Less suck and more bite
It’s funny isn’t it
That everything is…itself?

Jon had no idea
But his simple act
Was duplicated in me
I, too, offer mints
To others, halitosis or not.
It’s really not much to do with mints
I can take them or leave themIt’s masculine and unspoken

Like grooming primates
It’s that fleeting eye contact
The physical extension of an arm
The lack of words
That communicates all that is needed
So…Jon and I would sit there
In church often, quietly crunching
Our bad-breath stoppers

Love one another
As I have loved you
Makes me wonder if Jesus
Had he been alive now
Would have bought Extrastrongs?
I think he did
I think he was disguised
As a Jon

The last teabag

All these reminders of the
Ends of things…
The last tea bag lying flat
On the bottom of its glass jar
Lonely and waiting
Finally chosen
Evoking more than a brew
A meditation no less:

Seized with enough grip
Not to tear, transferred
From one world to another,
And deluged with scalding water
Suffering it seems
Before the glory,
That inner golden glow,
Infuses, floods, and fills

Polyphenol pleasure…
Liberated molecules diffusing,
Their leaf-bound cages breached,
Swimming free with a purpose?
Maybe not understood,
But, flexing with the passions
Of sudden heat and colour

Find their way to rest
On a human tongue or,
Ascending an olfactory maze,
Millions of years in the making,
For a few minutes
Bearing their unique calling
Their mission fruit:
Stillness, sighing, smiling

Like the final teabag
Unchosen, unknowing of
Any purpose; this life
Boiling us one moment
Neglecting us another
Not here to be ghettoed
But as a diaspora, to be tasted,
To still the One who made us

Contrasts

Within the space of ten days
My body and I have
Trodden on a volcanic island
All pumice, leeched copper and
Bands of iron ore, glimmering
Under a furnace of summer sun

Only to write these words
To the drumming rhythm
Of random English rain
Anticipating a morning journey
To the Welsh valleys
And steep sheep-bleating hillsides

Neither divorced from the sea
Where time gazing at spindrift
Flung far from wave crests
Is time well spent
Or waiting until the evening
Moonglades are illuminated

With a light within which
No crime seems possible
Its almost hypnotic stillness
Falling gently, soaking the
Good earth with
Reminders of reflected glory

And yet…flying bombs tonight
Will find their targets
Drones caressed by moonbeams
Carrying their deathnotes,
Waspy, mosquito whining drones
Heard too late, or never seen

Yes, we deep-sigh for contrasts
For headlines re-written
From volcanic fire
To bucolic peace
From hostages held too long
To cries of freedom

Ten days?
Surely that’s enough time?

Allotment Wisdom - February

It was John, two plots down,
I first saw unfurling great sheets
Of black roll
Breathable black plastic
Pinned down to the ground
With bricks and old lead pipes

Late October one year
November the next, after which
John, like the ground beneath,
Hibernating only to emerge
In February to inspect the bricks
Lift the roll, and sniff the soil

It was a binary life
Covers on, winter withdrawal
Covers off, sow in Spring
But there was an unease
Suppression is not deliverance
Like fire beneath the foam

The weed-seed encased in
Overwintered soil
Undisturbed lies ready
To thrust - at night it seems -
To spoil the perfection of
What looked barren

Bert, one plot removed,
Leaning on his hoe
Smiling at John, that’s all,
Left his earth to breathe
The winter air and
The foxes to run

Visited once a week
After harvest, and
Fork in hand,
Upended any weeds
Roots and all
Left them to rot

Not here

Words folded inside
The grieving
It’s a form of muteness
Where anything said
Is said through blank eyes
Devoid of the person not here

The one whose absence
Is fuller, more immediate
Than before, woven tightly
Into the fabric of
An interior world, the
Location of one not here

Externals continue
Of shirts buttoned,
Laces tied, and shaving,
Kettle-steam, and duvets
But there is no memory
Only of the one not here

Silences punctured
Only by convulsions
Then exhausted sleep
On the floor, maybe
Waking only to comfort
Those comforting you

And then, only then
Does it lift, quietly…
You touch the dust on a mirror
See teabags left to mould
The neglect of days
Unnoticed

Letters, cards on the mat
Beyond the front door
Now opened…
An inrush of cool air
The sound of the city
Life invading

You tell the one not here
‘Stay or leave as you wish
And make me weep or smile
Or rant and blow like a bull’
Our communion is safe now,
Forever secure

The Watering Can

It’s January-blue-sky-cold,
There’s no equal
The high clouds, still,
The air, like the frozen water
Unmoving

A week ago it was different
A vicious storm downed
Dried out branches
Did its work, shaking
The loose things of this world

Oddly, though, it uprighted
A watering can, can in name only
Green plastic, heavy now
With the storm rains, standing
As if deliberately placed

On an aging pink, moss-encrusted
Paving slab, perfectly central,
Open to the sky
Unable to fill or empty itself
Subject to storms

Like us, storm-tossed
And yet only to set us
Open to the deluges
Pouring down from heaven
And the gardener

Deep calls unto deep

Occasionally rules are
Exposed as faulty vessels
To carry such living words
Whose light, incapable
Of conforming, created
To do the conforming:
Words unfolding life to us

Take a word out of context
To make a pretext
Can hold the laws of children
A highway code, as daily bread,
Poor bread though,
A railway-track-wisdom
But deep calls unto deep

Words from the underneath
Interior bass notes
That reverberate beyond
And meet the unvoiced
Calling of another
Distant in miles, or persuasion,
But closer than a brother
Yes, deep calls to deep

Carrying far beyond
The need for words
Into the mine shaft
Reaching not for dark coals
But all that is contained
In multi-tonal hearts

Full of love colours,
Under strain maybe, yet love:
Of grief, of unlikely dreams
Of prayers, of waiting, longings
Of rhyming and discord
Weeping with those who weep
Over our Jerusalems

Deep calling unto deep
Not without purpose
But a joint pulling together
To gather in the ropes that bind
Any two, not made with twine
Or flax, or jute, but cordless
Ropes from the deep

Sinking into Silence

It’s a rare thing, that
Deep silence
Filled to the brim
Beyond a lack of noise

Talking has ceased
Distractions powerless
To unsettle, to undo the spell
One thing remains

Thirty heads stilled,
Just the scratch of a pen
A nose blown, gently,
A sigh, but within a cocoon,

A coalescence, an
Unspoken agreement
‘Do not disturb’ signs
Invisibly worn

A corporate meditation
Subtracting nothing
From the gearbox to
The wheels

From the inner man
To the hands wrapped
Round a pen, a chisel
Or softened clay

After, like waking,
Thirty heads see
Their neighbours as if
They were never there

It wasn’t a dream
But escaping the trance
There’s only one word
Satisfaction.

After

Busy people chase the afternoon
The loquacious gabble, burdened
With afterthoughts
And jet designers place afterburners
Well…aft

But nothing much compares
With living for the after-life

Having a destination after ‘this’
In mind

Is it a world that’s been washed,
Tumbled dried, smelling fresh,
Ironed by a celestial being
All creases flattened,
All wrinkles stretched,
All tears wiped away?

Or is it like a snake shedding its skin
Or a metamorphosis
That longest of primary school words
The glistening caterpillar cocoon
Fastened on a stick in a jam jar
Is that what we are? Waiting?
A dim version of what is to come?

A primary school world
Waiting to be elevated
Away with shorts and on with trousers
No more chapped thighs
Lowered into hot baths
Red skin now replaced with the mud
Of rugby fields, of men and boys?

Let me tell you
It’s the fourth day
After Christmas
Since the angel on top of the tree
Winked
And reminded us of the
Heavenly hosts in good voice
Welsh maybe, or Italian?
Or from the four corners
Belting out

‘Glory to God in the Highest
And peace, goodwill towards men’

The afterglow of Christmas
When the afterlife
Discarded it’s afterness
And glory in the highest
Fastened itself
To the lowest,
The least,
The lost.

We Three Kings

Gold

Looking for a love
That’s looking solely for me
I am Melchior

Frankincense

Pursuing a star
Light, like scent, falling on me
Caspar is my name

Myrrh

Sorrow piercing me
Nails driven into place
Balthazar I am

The Other Story

Trailing behind the donkey
The ever-present
Memory of a botched divorce
Joseph’s fear and love
Dictating his untold strife

And Mary’s inability to hide
A young girl embarrassed by an angel
Nine months of overshadowing
Leaving no trace of bitterness
Peace dictating her every thought

Together now, they travel
Away from the knowing looks
Unaware of the star, or the
Angels from the realms of glory
Of heaven touching Earth

How unaware we are also
Carrying our own travails
As we must into the Messiah-feast
And yet this is why we put lights on the tree
Why we bust the budget

Why, broken like Joseph, perhaps
We gather. Like the angels
We cannot be contained
Love has broken out; a reminder
Of the other story:

Of myriads of tough angel warriors
On tiptoe, like children
Waiting, singing, singing, waiting for
The first cry of one baby the
Starting gun for a feast that will never end

Love Me Tender

The weather forecast a
Short sentence, a précis,
Summing up the struggles
Of the atmosphere as
‘Gentle rain will fall’
On the summer-baked soil
It will fall, until suppertime
Until the earth is softened
By the tender rain

At school, now
I am five, maybe six, and
On the art table lies a
Block of ice-cold plasticine,
A pleasant pink slab
Of resistance, looking at me
Too hard, so it thinks, but
Patience wins, fashioning
Long warm snakes

One day I may purchase
A kitchen tool,
With mountain range stipples
And bring my weighted swings
Down upon inert meat and
Those tight unyielding fibres…
What is this wooden mallet?
An enemy or a friend?
A tenderiser; that’s its name.

Stay Your hand, Lord
Stow Your word of
Hammering love divine
‘Case I end up pummelled,
Destined, like Your Son, to say
‘I have come to do Your will’
Oh God! Ignore my prayer
Listen not to my sunbaked
Ice-cold resistance

Here I am…
Raise your holy hand
Swing Your weight
Until I am fully done
Until I taste as I should
Until I take Your shape
Come like gentle rain
Defeat my sun-hardened
Soil. Love me tender.

Amen.