The Musician (A Poem for Good Friday)

A memory of Kreisler once:

At some recital in this same city,

The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

On to the stage with a few others,

So near that I could see the toil

Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

Fluttering under the fine skin,

And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,

As we sat there or warmly applauded

This player who so beautifully suffered

For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary

In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:

The men standing by and that one figure,

The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

Making such music as lives still.

And no one daring to interrupt

Because it was himself that he played

And closer than all of them the God listened.

~ R.S. Thomas

The Musician

A memory of Kreisler once:

At some recital in this same city,

The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

On to the stage with a few others,

So near that I could see the toil

Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

Fluttering under the fine skin,

And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,

As we sat there or warmly applauded

This player who so beautifully suffered

For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary

In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:

The men standing by and that one figure,

The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

Making such music as lives still.

And no one daring to interrupt

Because it was himself that he played

And closer than all of them the God listened.

~ R.S. Thomas

This poem first came my way via a Jesuit friend and spiritual director, who sent it to me during some of my darkest days.  (This morning it appears here.)  He's in town this week, celebrating the Triduum masses at the Carmelite monastery, and that's where I went last night.  

Note to self: The first year, I made it halfway through an Easter vigil service and left.  Resurrection seemed far too improbable, and real life in the face of that improbability was too painful to contemplate. Last year, doing my field education, I survived several services over the course of the week-end in a state of numbness.  No idea what I was doing there, until that note a few months later from another mother with a son lost to suicide, telling me that she was helped by the knowledge that my experience of the holidays over the course of the year paralleled hers.  Last night:  a homily on memory, reverence, and service.  I am, finally, open to all of them, and to the Love at their source.  It seems that perhaps God listens most intently to each of us when our music is that of anguish.

A Different Kind of Christmas - Part 4

Early on Christmas morning, while it was still dark, I set out for the beach, about a ten-minute drive away.  The other members of my family have exhausted their resources when it comes to dealing with the ashes, and it probably seems odd that I would have decided that a Christmas sunrise on the beach at St. Augustine was a right time and place, but when I flipped open my phone and saw the reading that came up, I felt vindicated.

As I drove through the dawning light and walked along the beach where we all ran and played and sunned and built sandcastles for so many years, I thought about those words:

Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.  ~Luke 2:10-11. 

God's son, my son, incarnation, cross, life, death, light overcoming the dark.  It seemed to me exactly the right thing to do, to wade into the gentle ocean and scatter ashes as the sun rose.  

The next day, I found this poem stashed away in my email, and it seemed appropriate and compelling, given how I had celebrated Christmas:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

from "AD" by R.S. Thomas

Connected Encounters: More on Silence

Last week-end I heard a homily in which a bit of the following poem was quoted at the end. I recognized the name of the poet, because my former spiritual director had sent me another poem of his months ago. Yesterday as I arrived for my chaplaincy interview, the Jesuit who'd offered Saturday's homily was walking out of the hospital's pastoral care office. I don't know him (well, now I sort of do), but I intercepted him, and last night he sent me the poem he'd quoted.

I have had a series of other encounters between yesterday and today that I think have great bearing on my vocational discernment, but those will take a bit more time than I have this morning to relate. For now, this piece by R.S. Thomas, which seems to me to be intimately entwined with my experiences of what yesterday marked as exactly one and one-half years:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

~“AD” by R. S. Thomas in Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 (2004)