Christchurch Parish Website May 2020
A favourite poem of mine is by Seamus Heaney. The poem itself doesn’t have a title. It’s simply no. 8 in a sequence of poems in his collection entitled Seeing Things.
You can read the poem here on the Nobel website.
One way of reading the poem is that it’s all about the tension that comes when you’re living between two realities that coexist. There’s the reality of the monks at prayer. Then there’s the reality of the ship that appears above.
And of course, Heaney’s playing with the image here because the ceiling of the oratory where the monks are praying is shaped like the inverted hull of a ship, just as the ceiling in the Priory is. So in fact, in this poem, there’s not one ship. There are two. The one in which the monks are praying, the ship of the church if you like, and the ship that appears above them as they pray.
And it’s not that one is more real than the other. They are just two different realities, which, momentarily in the poem, coexist, connected suddenly by the anchor that drags behind the ship, hooking itself into the altar rails of the oratory.
A crewman shins down the rope to try and free the anchor.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’ / The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’
Living with two realities that coexist brings with it its own tension. Like the tense rope hooked into the altar rail by the anchor. Do we live by the reality with which we’re familiar? Or do we live by the reality that we’ve glimpsed?
It’s as if we can bear being between the two only for so long before we run out of the oxygen that we’re used to breathing and have to retreat back into the reality that’s more familiar to us.
For the crewman, the reality was the ship above. Once the ship’s anchor was released from the altar rails and the ship could continue its passage, the crewman climbed back ‘Out of the marvellous as he had known it’.
Of course, this all happens whilst the monks are praying.
Praying is living the tension between the two realities that coexist. Between the creation that we know and the new creation that has begun with Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Prayer is when we bring these two realities together. It’s when we say, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth [that’s the reality we’re familiar with] as it is in heaven [that’s the reality we’ve glimpsed in Jesus].
Like the crewman in the poem, after a while we find we have to come up for air. It’s as if we can only be between the reality we know and the reality we see in Christ for a relatively short period of time. We’re so used to breathing the oxygen of the our old reality that our old instinct keeps pulling us back, as it were, out of the marvellous, for fear of dying.
One of the things we’re doing when we pray is we’re learning to breathe the new air of the resurrection, the new creation that has begun with Jesus’ rising from the dead.
But learning to breathe the air of this new reality can feel like having to die to the old. Do we swim back up to the ship, gasping for breath, or do we let go and enter the new life through a metaphorical death which prefigures our ultimate death and entry into heaven.
We live in the tension between these two coexisting, overlapping realities, between the creation that is and the new creation that has begun.
But that’s where, as Christians, we’re called to live. In between. In the tension, bearing witness to both realities, the one we’re familiar with and the one that we’ve been given the gift of seeing in Christ. And as we do, we learn to breathe the hidden oxygen of the resurrection.
The Lord is Risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia!