BBC Radio 4 2016-07-18

Good Morning

Momentous events of the last few weeks seem to have rained so thick and fast that it’s hard to keep up. Whilst the aftershocks of the referendum and its consequences have yet to be absorbed at home, news from around the world – from Baghdad, from Orlando, from Dallas, from Nice, from Turkey, from Baton Rouge - raises further questions about the ‘taken-for-granted-ness’ of things. Suddenly those of us who’ve lived most of our lives in relative peacetime under relatively stable economic conditions are made aware that things change; that nothing lasts forever; even that civilisations can fall…

We are not perhaps, quite there, but when events seem so random and so brutal and press in where do we turn for some stillness in which we can pause and think and discern how to act?

One of the places to which I turn when I’m tempted to panic is poetry, and part of what the best of it can deliver is the naming and containment of the vulnerable sense of how small human beings are in the face of events: So T S Eliot in East Coker, echoing the book of Ecclesiastes, writes about the way in which houses are built and are destroyed and are replaced or return to open fields.

Eliot’s setting is domestic and yet he’s writing about the impermanence of everything, and how, in the face of the crumbling of what we know, knowledge acquired through experience seems weak or even useless. And how every moment requires a ‘new and shocking’ evaluation of what we’ve been.

In such circumstances when our values are in question and our way of life seems under threat and our responses seem inadequate there are perhaps only three options: to flee; to bluster or to go deeper.

For me the going deeper is facilitated by poetry; for Eliot it happens through Christian ritual; and what ritual does for us – is to make us be still and to know as Eliot puts it that ‘the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.’ A wisdom that comes from knowing ourselves to be small, and yet unafraid because we are held and loved.

In a poem called, Dich wundert nicht des Sturmes Wucht , translated by Anita Burrows and Joanna Macy, Rainer Maria Rilke, puts it like this,
Be earth now and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now like a thing
Ripened until it is real,
So that he who began it all
Can feel you when he reaches for you.

Perhaps this retreat into poetry or ritual seems too quietist, too passive, when there’s much to rage about and much to decide and much that needs fixing. Yet Eliot and Rilke, are both drawing on the ancient biblical wisdom that it’s the still small place from which true action springs; action that is not driven by fear or ego, but by sober truth, and by love.

First broadcast 18 July 2016