POEMS IN HOLY WEEK viii. Easter Sunday - United

This is the final poem in the sequence and in it I have tried to address some of the questions that seem important on this particular day.
          Once again, I found myself in the local leisure centre with notebook and pen to help me make sense of my responses to what I have been writing (I wonder if what I write would be different if I made my notes before my swim rather than after!)
          I think that it is probably obvious my now that my relationship with religion and specifically Christianity is not as simple as an atheist observing something totally foreign.  I am particularly sensible that I was brought up as an Anglican, was a practising church goer until my late twenties and I retain warm memories of the church and particularly of the literature of the Bible and The Book of Common prayer.
          Although I find Philosophy a difficult discipline I do try and read about it (even if I rarely read the actual works by philosophers) and religion is an essential component in such a study - even if you are rejecting it!
          I suppose that what I say in the final stanza of this poem, 'struggle is the vital way' is my attempt to find common ground, and to give the sequence some form of ending.  I do not think that any form of ethos is capable of giving complete reassurance about 'truth' and so intellectual engagement about what it might mean is a life long preoccupation for which our allotted span is far too short!  Which should mean another sequence next year!

Poems in Holy Week

viii.     Easter Sunday – United

All Easter Days in memory

have sun to brighten that

short walk from porch to lych;

along graves bright with

dying blooms; returning affirmations

of belief with mild, polite, unease.

While here and now, I watch

the greening trees, earth-islanded

in sunken circles in the dry cement.

As football, basketball, petanque

play on; with tea and coffee, beer and Coke.

And no one wishes anyone a Happy Day. 

And I’ve not gone to church,

again, this year.

It’s not the birth –

though that was odd enough –

or precocity, or even

the odd miracle (peculiar

things turn out to be quite

ordinary with passing time)

it is the central ‘fact’

on which the church is built

(that he rose from the dead)

that loses me.

We know that those

who make no claims about

their lives, die everyday.

And some by drugs, AR,

electric shocks and luck

come back to life – but,

this is not the same.

And those apologists who

juggle plausibility to make

miraculous mundane,

do no real service to their creed.

Some things in life are hard to take

and struggle is the vital way: 

for those with faith – and not.

I will print a Chapbook of this sequence of poems which I will send  (via email) to anyone who is interested, as long as they promise to respond with comments - and as long as they provide me with an email to send it to!

POEMS IN HOLY WEEK vi. Good Friday - Rejection

This poem tries to address my need to 'go to church' each Good Friday.  As a professed atheist, this intention has been met with incomprehension by those around me - and at times from me too.  When asked, I always say that I am an Anglican Atheist, as I am fairly clear about what it is that I do not believe, and those ideas centre around the faith in which I was raised: Anglicanism and The Church in Wales.
          In some ways the visit to my local church here in the centre of Castelldefels in Catalonia was one of the least satisfactory 'jaunts' that I have made, for reasons the poem makes clear.
          I would be foolish if I tried to deny the importance that Christianity and Anglicanism have had on the way in which I have developed.  The language and stories of the Authorised Version of the bible and the language of The Book of Common Prayer have played and continue to play an important part in my writing and my thought.
          It will be interesting to see if my 'sort of ritual' is continued next year.

Poems in Holy Week

vi.       Good Friday – Rejection

The knowing glances seem to say,

“To own a lack, is to admit to loss.”

It puts me on the back foot, straight away,

as I insist that I am not content

until I’ve stepped inside,

and sat a while, in church.

It’s just today.  A sort of ritual

for me.  And I insist my lack

of faith is strong enough to let

the need, on this one day,

be satisfied without denying

what it is I think I do believe.

The church, which occupies

the central square of our small town

is windowless.  The bays are filled

with giant trompe l’oeil paintings

of the Life of Christ - but difficult

to see in sacred gloom.

The altar was well lit.

And stretched across its length:

a full sized, realistic, loincloth wearing

corpse, whose damaged head was resting

on a pillow fringed with dingy lace.

The stuff of nightmares! 

                                   

                                    Not for those

whose sensibilities are dulled

by other bloody horrors chapel-caged.

But on an atheistic jaunt,

with only half-remembered Anglican

restraint to guide me through

the foreign country of a different faith,

I felt like an intruder on a savagery

I did not understand, and did not want

to visit, even once a year.

I am looking forward to putting all these poems together (when they are complete) and finding out how they read as a sequence.  It may be that I change the order of them, cut the names of the days in the title and reform the sequence in another way.

          Given what I have written so far I am interested to find out what the last two days will produce.  I know it sounds strange for the person who is writing the work to speak like that, but I have no idea whatsoever what form the last two poems will take.

          And that, in itself, is interesting!