PIHW 6 Good Friday in Holy Week - Church visiting

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me as an atheist, I make a real effort to visit a church on Good Friday.  I do not stay for a service and sometimes my visit is fleeting, but I feel a need to visit a church on Good Friday. 

     This year because of Covid-19 and the lockdown visiting a church was impossible.  And I surprised myself by how much I felt the loss. 

     As I always describe myself as an Anglican Atheist it is easy to suppose that my desire is a nagging fag-end of the faith that I once had trying to get me back.  But I truly do not think that this is so.  I am comfortable with my atheism, but I am equally comfortable with accommodating my knowledge of the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church together with Hymns Ancient and Modern, a smattering of Christian theology and the history of religion, knowledge of the Lives of the Saints and their depiction in art, and a working knowledge of Church Architecture!  A chunk of my cultural background in grounded in Christianity and is an essential part of who I am, but I simply do not have the Christian Faith.

     I am also aware of the “methinks he doth protest too much” argument which avers that my very avowal of atheism masks my essential faith in Christianity.  I think not, but I have friends who are totally convinced by such an assessment.

     I feel comfortable in churches, but especially in smaller, older, more restrained Anglican churches like Saint Augustine’s in Rumney, which is a solid barn-like building with fewer of the gory Baroque excesses of Roman Catholic decoration.  But I do get some satisfaction from churches that are far from my parochial ideal.

     So, in the following poem I have tried to express what I feel about the fact that I have broken the tradition of visiting a church on Good Friday and I also try to address a part of what I feel that I do when I write.

Church visiting

Dexterity for me is

jabbing, interrupted glide

across and up and down

well-polished keys.

My fingers feel for words,

they know where letters are

without my thought,

and thus I draw my pictures

without pen,

my comfortable places:                               

book-lined walls,

a well-placed lamp,

a polished-sturdy desk,

a back-supporting chair,

a white-clear screen.

Is all.  I tell myself.  I need.

And yet.  Today I am denied.

Today I go to church.

To any church.

Only for moments.

For one day in the year.

Today’s the day.  Today.

It’s what I do.

But I’m to house confined.

And now I find

that all my fingers can

in conjuring a place, the sounds,

the smells, the feel of pews,

the gleam of glass, the statues’

glassy stares, the shuffles of

the Others there, are not enough.

I am not there.  Enough.

My words are not enough.

I need a ‘there’.

Because I want to take

and not to give.  Today.

One day to take.

And I have been denied,

more than a day.

This poem has been a time in the making.  The original notes which form the basis of the thought were written a while ago and, as I was writing them, I felt that the poem would virtually write itself.  I have learned from hard experience that such feelings are almost always woefully wrong.
     This poem has gone through many drafts, and I am not sure that they have reached a conclusion - but I also think it's worthwhile posting what I have done so far so that I can read it with a certain degree of distance.  It's only then that fruitful future directions can be selected.
     With my poetry, if the inspiration is not 'swimming' then it has to be 'trees' - and that was the case with this poem.  I find the tree-change between winter and spring magical.  I never seem to find the apparent resurrection ordinary, even though I know it happens.  My mind drifted (as it does when I am sipping my special brew) to how early humankind must have viewed the transformation of an arid landscape into a verdant one.  One line I did not use from my notes was, "All language lives and dies in trees" and, while I am not convinced that I believe that, the line did contain something which I thought was important.  I felt that the life of trees (and plants) must have posed fairly important, basic, fundamental questions through human time as soon as human memory developed and distinctions were drawn.
     This (again) is a sonnet-like poem which seems, at the moment, to be a format that I am trying to explore.
     I am drawn to the opening and closing words, I feel that there is a satisfying circularity - which I do not necessarily see as comforting.
     This is a poem that, having written it, I am still coming to terms with.

Questioning

Corruption rots.  And makes the loam

that roots a single tree upon an empty plain.

The wind-curved branches punctuate

a thought – and apprehensive minds

form words, trying to tame

wild concepts breaking from the earth.

(The unforgiving lash of life.  Again,

luscious and fresh.  A green, green curse.)

Anchored fecundity runs rings around

the seasons’ captives struggling for faith:

bound tight in buds, or hidden in the sound

of leafless wood that, cut and burning,

spits and sizzles in the flames
mocking the mortality of death.

I wish (do I?) that I could say that I wrote the last line with the same confidence as John Donne.  I realise that any possible variant on the, 'Death thou shalt die' theme is bound to be seen as triumphalist and essentially Christian and a lineal descendent of that wonderful phrase.  I can only say that such thoughts are not mine.  I would point to the phrase, "The unforgiving lash of life" and suggest that there is little positive in this poem, and the "apprehensive minds" are "trying," not necessarily succeeding, in finding meaning.  I think the final line is a paradox or double negative or pun or animistic personification or something - but not comforting!

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!