ROOTS

 

“King Jesus hath a garden, full of divers flowers”        

Geestlijcke Harmonie, 1633

In Europe, parts of Russia and modern Turkey  the civilisation of the Post Roman Empire was firmly rooted in the Judaeo-Christian values and tradition which profoundly influenced every aspect of human life.  Law, social organisation, ethics, education, care of the sick, literature, the graphic arts, architecture, music - all sprang from and were widely nurtured by the Christian Churches: Roman Catholic, Holy Orthodox,  Protestant, mainstream and heretical offshoots alike.  Pockets of Judaism established throughout Europe, and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula had their parts to play, but sixteen  hundred years of Christian faith and practice remained the platform on which our whole culture and values, our taboos and justice were founded. 

    With the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ intrusion of Theism and Deism, of Rationalism and Utilitarianism, of secular philanthropy and the increasing secularisation of education, of  aggressively  secular political theory and organisation into European and American thinking and society,  our Christian foundations came under prolonged attack.  Out of this maelstrom of new ideas advanced and old beliefs cast aside, there also developed on the one hand more liberal and less hierarchical new religious organisations - the Society of Friends for example, but on the other hand a tendency for some of the existing churches of the Reformation themselves to be reformed - amongst others Anglicans into Methodists and Unitarians. But whatever the new organisations or theologies the majority of the new denominations regarded themselves as Christian even if the old establishment condemned them as heretical. 

    It was I suppose inevitable and reasonable that over the next two hundred years when oppressed people revolted against all the institutions of the illiberal state, including against the churches established and supported by those illiberal states, Christian teaching and preaching became the butt of the new scientists, political thinkers and radical activists.  Many Christian folk responded by proclaiming and acting out “the social Gospel” - Evangelicals, Christian Socialists, Congregationalists, Quakers, the Salvation Army, and Unitarians.  The Christian foundations may have been rocked, but remained more or less intact.

   

    Soon the demarcations of the Christian denominations became even more complicated.  Universal principles gained ground in both main stream and fringe churches; tolerance of individual and “different” beliefs became increasingly important.  Ideas new to the West were infiltrating from eastern religion and spirituality into European and American chapels and churches; God Himself was denied by agnostic theologians and militant atheists; whole denominations  became hotbeds of controversy and secularism laughed to see the infighting  amongst Christian denominations.  A disgruntled Quaker lady Universalist said to me: “These Christocentrics within the Society are very hurtful people.”  While another told me “Of course I’ve had a lot of trouble with the G-word.  I don’t use it in my writing now.”  I might have laughed, but I thought perhaps the circumstances were too tragic - their wonderful respectful tolerance to all faiths, and none, was being eroded now by tired old factionalisms, and fresh prejudices. 

    One Sunday morning in Canterbury Cathedral amidst a great company of folk at the Sung Eucharist I realised that in conscience I could no longer recite the Nicene Creed.  In the words of  Norbert Fabian Capek in a letter written in 1910 to Thomas Masaryk the first President of Czechoslovakia describing his deconversion from the Baptist church:

“I did not believe that Jesus is God, and that Jesus’ father, as the first person in the holy Trinity, asked his son to become a human being and to shed his innocent blood in order to appease God the Father for people, that is to say, those who believe in Jesus in this sense. I did not believe in the infallibility of the Bible …  I did not believe that God condemned the whole humankind for Adam’s sin, and I did not believe either in hereditary sin or never ending suffering in hell, and other orthodox doctrines.”

    So I slipped out of the Church of England, and eventually into the un-gathered congregation of the National Unitarian Fellowship.  I had held very dear the rituals of the Anglo Catholic Church of England,  the drama of the celebration of the Mass, the sense of two thousand years of continuity of worship and love, and I still do.  But I believe that Jesus was a man, a spiritual teacher and leader of immense power and influence,  and he always was and still is my prophet and spiritual director.  Thus as a disciple, a student of Jesus Christ, I nominate myself as a Christian.  I nominate myself as an Unitarian because it was my un-belief in the Nicene Creed, and most particularly in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought my worshipping membership of the Christian Church to its end.  I did not leave to escape from Christ but rather from the promulgations of the Early Fathers and the Council of Nicea.  I did not slip onto the Unitarian Raft to denigrate Christianity and abandon my Teacher, but to pursue my own individual spiritual search in the company of open minded, tolerant, careful and caring friends.  Such friends I have found in our virtual congregation and I thank God for them. 

    I do have the greatest sympathy for those Christians who have escaped from Christian denominations and individual churches where the weapons of choice are submission and fear and spiritual blackmail, and who have small wish to be reminded of those horrors here in the safety of our open Unitarian Fellowship. Nor would I expect them to subscribe to a neo-Christian identity. The Christian institutions and the hierarchies I left behind were mercifully benign and I am able still to honour my Judaeo-Christian roots and the teaching and example of the Man of Peace who lived and died in Galilee two thousand years ago.  Would that this were so for all of us.

   If you find a flower, an Oxeye Daisy an ancestor of whom once gave you a rash, now encroaching on the margin of a smart new  bed of  low pollen hydrangeas, do you dig it up and chuck it into the efficient eco-friendly incinerator? Or do you forgive the bitter memory of its great grandmother and make room for both the modest daisy and the opulent hydrangea in your tidy court-yard garden?  Do you poison the roots of the centuries old Derbyshire Newton Wonder apple tree to make way for the new Japanese Sayaka variety, or do you love and nurture them both in a sunny corner of your quiet orchard, side by side and harmonious in their differences?

“The Crown Imperial bloometh too in yonder place,

'tis charity, of stock divine, the flow'r of grace.”

Naomi

Illustration:  Fritillary 'Imperial Crown'    from John Edwards' British Herbal , 1769

Prometheus

A fulmar, high above the cliff top railings, banks and turns
into the breeze, marbled wings slender and delicate,
a mosaic of airy platinum and filigree steel.
Westward he flies across the bay over the shimmering waves gilded
by a burnished amber sun,
and soars into the haze, mother of pearl where the watery horizon
kisses the melting sky and merges into eternity.
For one magnificent moment he is silhouetted shadow dark
against that fiery solar vortex where the souls of the dead are gathering,
and the resurrection trumpets sound.
He is gone like smoke absorbed into darkness unseen,
a silent echo of a song as yet unheard, palpable memory of a forgotten dream,
jubilant spirit into the shining air of a new morning,
unbound and free.

Naomi

Dedicated to the memory of Dr Jim Fowler, member of the National Unitarian Fellowship, 
died  2011

The Invitation

 
Across the green of the sea kissed downs, flies my bird,
Cushioned on winds first warmed by desert sun
Where camel and Beduin for ever walk
Into a shimmering horizon, mysterious and bright.
 

Up and up he rises, my bird, a speck of dark light
In a sky of cerulean blue, a day star in the stillness
Of a summer afternoon. He hovers now, my bird,
Oh so gently, like an idle leaf in the soft June air.
 

Then, tumbling from the sky, stalling and whirling,
An acrobat exuberant, my bird beckons,
A pinioned king wonderful in his dignity and power.
And I can only marvel at this Malachi pointing me to heaven.

Naomi

 Winter - Drab Beauty

It was as if overnight some Renaissance angel
had seized a vast pallet, monochromatic with every shade of grey,
to paint anew the great curving sweep of the bay,
until it now reappeared shimmering and mysterious,
stone carved behind a frosted curtain of fine silken gauze.

From the sheltering cliffs in the West
to the ever turning Light of the foreland in the East,
the very shore itself was grey, the sand
like roughly powdered slate abandoned on the floor
of a worked out, long forgotten mine.

There were beach huts, their sharks teeth roofs silhouetted
anthracite against ashen cliffs;
and long fingers of rock, Davy’s grey, pointing down the sand towards
a soft running, gently retreating, phantasmal sea.

Around the abandoned rock pools cast in shiny hematite
sat dark cinereous gulls, marbled grey fulmars and pallid kittiwakes
whose sad cry echoed thinly through the smokey chill on the lonely beach.

A rusty tanker rode the sea’s drab rim, chalk white now from stern to stem
made new again by the generosity of a profligate winter sun.
From the cliff path an old man, flat capped and rheumy eyed, watched
the wind farm’s etherial towers springing from the sea
like a cohort of tall charcoal guardsmen,
darkly disguised against the fading horizon of the eastern sky.

The sun slipping unseen behind the cliffs into the western ocean,
fired slivers of light, rock-dove pale, into the banks
of cumulus clouds, huge and delicate globes of dappled swansdown,
their moving across the bay almost imperceptible
in the soft platinum mist above the silvered water.

The old man gone back to his fire and his tea,
I was left alone on the grey stone path
mesmerised by this luminous marine grisaille,
humbled last Thursday afternoon by such an extraordinary
and haunting beauty - shore and sea and sky made holy.

Naomi

Autumn: The Song of the Horn Poppy

Seeds wafting along the beach in the crisp air of the October morning,
we dance all day with an ebullient breeze, a seminal Morisca
jaunty and passionate, in a circle of unchanging hope.
At last I sink to the ground weary in the calm of an owl hooting evening,
and on fine shingle kelp brown, safe in my lonely solitude,
I sleep.

In the cold sandy earth, as the soft rains of May gently penetrate my meagre
covering, I awake. The nascent summer sun warms my dark home
and I stretch my roots deep beneath my stony bed.
I push pallid green shoots and fragile golden buds upwards into a
trembling June birth. I leave the sheltering womb,
I am newly born.

My home is the salty margin of the shore where kittiwake and tern orbit
and plunge, feathered arrows piercing the abundant waves.
My stem is thick clasped by succulent leaves, grey green
like the waters of the bay beneath the ever changing light. Nourished
by my stony ground, embracing wind and storm,
I reach up to the sky.

Each of my flowers opens its golden cup to the sun, each horn is pregnant
with a hundred seeds, new life rampant now within the old.
The measure of the days of my flowers is but one,
and slow showers of petals fall from glaucous stalks like
tarnished stars onto the dying surface of some long spent planet.
Soon my own short span of years will be done and
I too shall die.

My seeds, raven black, blue black, scattered by birds, plucked into the air
by importunate winds, will fall to the cold evening ground
and they also will sleep the long winter through.
So it all begins again.

In this mighty ever turning circle of life and death and resurrection, we celebrate
and dance the rituals of our ancient Trinity, thus to honour
the elements which by the grace of God sustain us,

Earth, and Air, and Rain.

Naomi

 Summer - Sea Campion

A man and his dog stand poised at the edge of the soft waves,
two creatures caught up in a moment of infinity,
luminous in a sweet light of etherial beauty,
anonymous for ever in the memory
like some forgotten prehistoric creature trapped in amber.

There is an old tall ship on the silver horizon, schooner four masted
in her pride, sailing still and motionless from nowhere
to an unknown destination, a fugitive plucked
out of her time, given into the charge
of an unheeding wind, a blind navigator and a careless sun.

Beach huts across the bay, preposterous in their deckchair coats of
many colours, sleep shimmering in the high noon heat, each
an unique area of silence lost in an invisible glass bowl
abandoned on a dusty shelf in an empty shop,
while the unceasing cry of gulls echoes mournfully around the cliffs.

At the edge of the shore a ring of sea campions surrounds a mirror of dark light
reflecting the whole bay. This is the place of Yesterday unremembered,
Tomorrow ignored. It is Now where we see how all things are,
held for ever in the frail white clasp of a flower,
perpetual shadows of the reality that is the immutable mind of God.

Naomi

Spring - Old Tree

I am the old tree in the corner of the forest;
Bark crumbling, I watch my dead wood fall;
I am hollow-hopeless, no squirrel enjoys my shelter;
My November-withered strength lies crushed beneath Spring’s quiet glory.
Budless branches mocked by lustrous ferns,
I am a thing empty and barren in the midst of burgeoning plenty.

I am the old tree in the corner of the forest;
Around my dried out roots new life escapes the earth,
Oak seedlings and oxslips, hazel and juniper,
Wood sorrel and the common purple mallow;
Yellow-necked mice burrow beneath my rotting leaves,
Beaks full of insects, treecreepers spiral up my fissured trunk.

I am the old tree in the corner of the forest.
Dancing children circle me, singing in the shadowed sun of evening;
They have brought scarlet berries and blue-violet daisies
To decorate my cracked and rotting woody carapace,
Strewn sweet herbs and rose petals about me;
And their song to God the Mother is a Hymn of Praise.

Naomi