Fides Quaerens Albus

Mocked King clown, stag thorn-crowned, carpenter's nails impale wrists and feet. Stripped peasant, powerless slave sold for thirty silver pesos. Back bled, skin flayed, failed prophet forgotten for all time, writhes displayed. Man's creation bitter fruit on tree of damnation. Heat, sweat, thirst, shroud of darkness curse. Yeshoua screams, lungs burst in deep, sea-deep despair. Head bows, hot tears, corpse slumps limp into night's silent vault.

This is the place of prayer Here, where the inward-pointing nails converge. The ever-narrowing gate when the world of time and space yields up its measured form. Here in the needle's eye Dark upon dark. The aching, echoing void of the hollowed heart suspended at the point of change. Unknowing [and that is the agony] bearing the unknown to the mystery at the place of prayer.

A Hymn by Brian Wren to the tune 'Kocher' Here hangs a man discarded, a scarecrow hoisted high, a nonsense pointing nowhere to all who hurry by. Can such a clown of sorrows still bring a useful word when faith and hope seem phantoms and every hope absurd? Yet here is help and comfort for lives by comfort bound, when drums of dazzling progress give strangely hollow sound: Life, emptied of all meaning, drained out in bleak distress, can share in broken silence our deepest emptiness; And love that freely entered the pit of life's despair, can name our hidden darkness and suffer with us there. Christ, in our darkness risen, help all who long for light to hold the hand of promise, till faith receives its sight.

Torn feet and cursed earth, The long line in the gray morning. The Buna smokes from a thousand chimneys, A day like every other day awaits us. The whistles terrible at dawn: ‘You multitudes with dead faces, On the monotonous horror of the mud Another day of suffering is born.’ Tired companion, I see you in my heart. I read your eyes, sad friend. In your breast you carry cold, hunger, nothing. You have broken what’s left of the courage within you. Colorless one, you were a strong man, A woman walked at your side. Empty companion who no longer has a name, Forsaken man who can no longer weep, So poor you no longer grieve, So tired you no longer fear. Spent once-strong man. If we were to meet again Up there in the world, sweet beneath the sun, With what kind of face would we confront each other? 28 December 1945

And God held in his hand A small globe. Look, he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows: a bright Serpent, a river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened The sky. Many people Held out their thin arms To it, as though waiting For a vanished April To return to its crossed Boughs. The son watched Them. Let me go there, he said.

Often I try To analyze the quality Of its silences. Is this where God hides From my searching? I have stopped to listen, After the few people have gone, To the air recomposing itself For vigil. It has waited like this Since the stones grouped themselves about it. These are the hard ribs Of a body that our prayers have failed To animate. Shadows advance From their corners to take possession Of places the light held For an hour. The bats resume Their business. The uneasiness of the pews Ceases. There is no other sound In the darkness but the sound of a man Breathing, testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions One by one to an untenanted cross.

Who said that trees grow easily compared with us? What if the bright bare load that pushes down on them insisted that they spread and bowed and pleated back on themselves and cracked and hunched? Light dropping like a palm levelling the ground, backwards and forwards? Across the valley are the other witnesses of two millennia, the broad stones packed by the hand of God, bristling with little messages to fill the cracks. As the light falls and flattens what grows on these hills, the fault lines dart and spread, there is room to say something, quick and tight. Into the trees' clefts, then, do we push our folded words, thick as thumbs? somewhere inside the ancient bark, a voice has been before us, pushed the densest word of all, abba, and left it to be collected by whoever happens to be passing, bent down the same way by the hot unreadable palms.

Philosophers have measur’d mountains, Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings, Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:         But there are two vast, spacious things, The which to measure it doth more behove: Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.         Who would know Sinne, let him repair Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,         His skinne, his garments bloudie be. Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.         Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say         If ever he did taste the like. Love in that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

In the middle of the world, in the centre Of the polluted heart of man, a midden; A stake stemmed in the rubbish From lipless jaws, Adam’s skull Gasped up through the garbage: ‘I lie in the discarded dross of history, Ground down again to the red dust, The obliterated image. Create me.’ From lips cracked with thirst, the voice That sounded once over the billows of chaos When the royal banners advanced, replied through the smother of dark: ‘All is accomplished, all is made new, and look- All things, once more, are good.’ Then, with a loud cry, exhaled His spirit.