From Wendell Berry’s May 2022 Sabbath poem: But the old man knows, contrarily, that this world was made by love. He knows it because that love came to him one time in the person of a girl and it abides in the girl’s great-grandmotherhood. He knows the world was made by love because of his experience of faithful love. As below, so above–an inversion of the Hermetic saying.
Receptive, my heart became, to every form.
A meadow for gazelles, and a cloister for the monks,
A house for the idols, and the pilgrim’s Ka’aba,
The tablets of the Torah, pages of the Qur’an.
My religion is love’s own and wheresoever turn
Her caravan, that love is my religion and my faith.
Not first upon the Cross God let Himself be slain,
For see! He lieth dead there at the feet of Cain.
From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and greenworld all together ; Star-eyed strawberry-breasted Throstle above her nested Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within ; And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell. All things rising, all things sizing Mary sees, sympathizing With that world of good Nature’s motherhood. From “The May Magnificat” by Gerald Manley Hopkins
I recently came across a wonderful Marian prayer and thought I’d share it here. I’ve added to the Clerk of Oxford’s translations in brackets, but all the translations are from her post. Hail, lady, sea-star bright, God’s mother, edy wight [blessed creature] Maiden ever, first and late, Of heaven’s realm the sely gate. [blessed gate] The ‘Ave’ thou received in spell [message] From the angel’s mouth called Gabriel In grith [peace] us set and shielded from shame,
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him,
I have a tab open with Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us” and I’ve read it several times over the last few days. I think I have @tinyroofnail to thank for this.
Hast thou not beheld the Yellow River Which flows from Heaven? It runs rapidly down and empties into the sea, Nevermore to return. Hast thou beheld the mirror in the hall That reflects the grief of white hair? In the morning it is like black silk, In the evening it will be covered with snow. While we are in the mood of joy, Let us drink! Let not the golden bottle be lonely, Let us waste not the moon!
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray, read by Iain McGilchrist