Word made flesh made word
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Isaiah 60:1-3, 19-20; 1 John 1:1-5
There’s such a joy in the words John begins his first letter with:
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—
It’s as if he can’t keep quiet about his experience of the word of life made flesh. Lots of his senses are involved – hearing, sight, touch – and it’s so exciting within him it has to burst out. Vv. 1, 2, 3 – he declares it. V. 5 – he proclaims it. V. 4 – We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. Every verse is the expression of the deepest, life-changing reality, too wonderful to be cool about. And the experience? that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
Declaring, writing, proclaiming the faith. Scots have been good at that in certain ways. Or if not good, at least profuse. Sermons, often lengthy, from countless pulpits. Theological tomes. Biblical commentaries. Debates at General Assemblies. Confessions of faith. Church law. As Edwin Muir, sometime St Andrews resident, put it in a poem,
The Word made flesh here is made word again.
But in other ways, artistic ways, poetic ways, imaginative ways, Scots have been reticent for a long, long time. For hundreds of years it was a Calvinist fear of any text but scripture. Today it’s more likely to be a fear of being seen as sympathetic to Calvinism or Catholicism or any conviction in the Christian path. And so it is good that there is now a Second Edition of a book called Scottish Religious Poetry, from which the five poems in today’s service have all been drawn. How can these texts and other works of art help us in our journey through Advent?
Let’s begin with faithful representation of the story. The annunciation in the 16th Century Beaton panel draws on long tradition in imagining Mary’s encounter with the angel – Mary reading, a winged Gabriel, flowers, a dove. William Drummond’s poem beautifully re-tells the story of the shepherds and angels and birth of Jesus. But he also captures something of the letter-writing John’s delight:
This is that Night, no, Day growne great with Blisse.
There is day emerging from the night, light from darkness.
The painting by the Victorian William Bell Scott, born in Edinburgh, depicts the shepherds with a lovely sense of light coming through the dilapidated roof and walls of the byre.
By the 20th Century there were fewer artists in Scotland so willing to offer the conventional, or even the sentimental. Hew Lorimer’s statue of Our Lady of the Isles on South Uist is stark and dramatic, a pugnacious statement of faith looking out to the west, over the shore and churning Atlantic seas. Angus Dunn’s poem about the statue Uist Madonna is less convinced of religious truth. This poet is all too aware of the power of nature, the rough Hebridean weather, and the inescapability of death. For him, only one window gleams all night long/ to light the way home. There is light, but the storms of life seem stronger.
I wonder if the hallmark of contemporary Scottish religious poetry is that it’s not religious in any traditional way. Dorothy Margaret Paulin’s poem, December Day, is aware of the reality of suffering and struggle in our time – war, and present misery. But she proposes nothing obviously divine as a solution. Instead, she pays close attention to the beauty of wintry light in our country, and finds hope in nature’s cycle, earth’s ageless peace. She concludes that love in man works on/ And shall not cease. But is this a love from beyond us, to save us, or our own love, entirely creaturely? She doesn’t make us choose.
Some writers spend their lives wrestling with that question. Earlier this year the poet, novelist, writer of memoir and much more John Burnside died. As Professor of Creative Writing here, there was a Celebration of his life and work in this chapel two months ago, which I led. So many of his poems and plots return again and again to faith, to scripture, to the beliefs and practices of his Catholic upbringing. But they often do so to find new meanings in the old language. In Nativity, for example, there is explicitly no angel, no guiding star. While there is a fleck of presence/waiting to be born, this is not the incarnation of God, for we alone are God’s grace/ by other means. How do we make this world? From gravity and light. In other words, from Physics and Astronomy. I love Burnside’s evocations of autumn light, and winter light. In his struggle to move on from religious language, I find ways for me to understand God’s grace afresh.
Scottish artists are enthralled by light – maybe because it can’t be taken for granted, given our short winter days, and grey northern light all year round. I remember an Irish flatmate of mine in Aberdeen saying he thought we should just roll up each day in the winter week into one bright, brilliant 24 hours, then live in darkness for six days.
I love Joan Eardley’s winter landscapes, often from around her home in Catterline in Aberdeenshire. There is snow, and a leaden grey sky, but a hint of an orange sun, or lemon moon in her work. Alan Spence’s poem, All About the Light, reads in part as a meditation on Eardley’s landscapes – Snow moment. Winter fence. Numinous tree./ Considered silence.
He asks us to look. What we have looked at, says John in his letter. That Latin word Circumspice means to look around, to see what’s there. And then to celebrate what we find is there, as if the ordinary stuff of life is itself sheer miracle.
Some of you will know that I am re-telling the nativity story day by day in the Chaplaincy’s Advent Calendar in a story called Feathers. It’s set among students and others in contemporary St Andrews, but it does not re-write the mystery and miracle of the scriptural texts. I believe with John that God is light, and that Jesus is that light come into the world, the Day growne great with Blisse. I say Amen to Isaiah’s words, the Lord will be your everlasting light. Many students and others in chapel and online today will share that faith. But others may be drawn to this different religious poetry and art, which glimpses a wintry mesh of gold, one gleaming window, a flock of redwings flitting through the fog, the shape of the shadow. Without explicit divinity, this is a vision of creaturely significance, and the promise of light in life, joy, and peace in a dark world. Wherever we sit on the spectrum of faith, ultimately it’s all about the light.
END