Easter snow

Easter has now come and gone again, and talk of fixing the date or the weather will abate for another year. Of course such casual conversation allows us a distraction from the real Easter stuff that puts Easter at the heart of the Christian faith.

For me Christian spirituality is earthy stuff. It happens from the ground up and it is about down-to-earth things. Yes, of course the skies, the heavens and the heights are quite marvelous in their own ways but I beleive in life before death and therefore most of what I pray and write concentrates on the ground.

Take Easter Saturday, when we interred my mum's ashes in the churchyard at Hatfield Broad Oak. It was a day of four seasons with every possible weather. We dug the hole for the ashes ourselves and placed them in ourselves, and covered them with earth ourselves. Not so remarkable you might think, except that the British way of death has become increasingly removed from the living. Our sincere thanks to the dozen or so people who stood in the snow laden wind and joined in.

Earth to earth

Cover the earth with a blanket of snow;
cover it, cover it all
so that the cut of the spade
and the turned turf
are invisible again.

After the snow wake the earth gently;
wake it, wake it up
so that each bud
each leaf and blade
emerges fresh and whole.

Inconvenient

As the week of weeks progresses we get into more difficult territory. All the movies and celebrities of our time will never really be able to convey the real horror, even with the lights out and a lot of beards. There are more authentic insights into the sense of hopelessness that was building up and overflowing then and continues now. See the photographs from any of the current war zones, the protests in Lhasa, the conditions in which whole communities live with rampant rates of HIV and AIDS. In some ways the horror is compounded by our ability in Britain to distance ourselves from most of this and to respond 'How awful' to the mildest forms of minor inconvenience like when the supermarket runs out of the product we wanted to buy. Just how awful is that?


How awful

Unable to cross the border into your own country,
unsure where to find clean water or medicine,
unlikely to be able to feed your family,
uncertain if you will be arrested for speaking out:
how much worse can it get?

Quite likely to loose your legs to a land mine,
have to carry your child to an under-equipped hospital
or get raped going to fetch water;
certain to be imprisoned illeagally for years and years:
reader be sure to understand.

Be sure to understand that all this and more
is happening today to someone like you,
with a life like yours,
in a country not far from here.

Will you wait until it happens to you
before you say anything?


[Mark 13:14-23]

The week

This is the week:
the week of cheers
that turn to mocking and jeers
and then to silence
that storms out of twisted streets
to stand at crossroads
in Lhasa, Harare and Rangoon;
the half-remembered week
where guttering flames
and a few lined faces
keep this vigil, still;
the week that takes us further
than any other
and always ends in tears.

just bloggin

I got this blog free when I signed up to write up my PhD. I don't think this is going to be a poem, in fact I'm not really sure what it's going to be. Indeed, I'm not really very sure about blogs.

Being a novice blogger I'm not sure what to put. Things like, 'I got here on the tram', or 'it's a nice day' all seem a bit naff. I did get here on a tram and it is quite a nice day. But to be honest I'm not sure I need a free blog - I just need to write up my PhD. I have yet to be convinced that having a free blog will help me do this.

Currently my PhD survival strategies are:

Classic FM

looking out of the window

hot chocolate with cream on

collecting lots of things that look as if they have a passing reference to my PhD subject

putting off writing my PhD

doing the washing

writing everything except a PhD

All of these have got my through 7 years of part time PhD registration and to the point of having a reasonable draft, which probably now needs completely rehashing. Having a free blog, whilst sitting comfortably in the above list, does not at first sight appear to be a strategy likely to get me any nearer completing the PhD than any of the others featured.



God did not post a blog,

he sent a bloke

who borrowed a moke

and made an entrance

to start a week

so holy

that we've not seen the like since.

As we plod on,

cross-wards

may we be carried by integrity

and commitment.



PS: Other frequently used PhD strategy (along with 90% of the population) is prayer.



PPS: 'Moke' , which I may have spelled wrong, is cockney for donkey.