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Leeds District |
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January 2012 |
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“Honest muttering”
The 16th Century poet, Thomas Wyatt, wrote to his son, “No doubt in anything you do, if you ask yourself or examine the thing for yourself afore you do it, you shall find, if it be evil, a repining against it. My son, for our Lord’s love, keep well that repining…..”.
Alice Oswald, a 21st Century poet with a concern for ethics and ecology, recently wrote of these words as the best advice for any poet. She went on to emphasise the importance, for a poet, of not ignoring the “repining”, or in her words, “the honest muttering in your head”.
The parallels between poetry and faith fascinate me. There seems to be an unspoken language that both intuitively understand – a deep, common source and wellspring. We begin the year 2012 amidst many clamouring voices, within our communities, our nation, and the world. As people of Christian faith – we must never seek to silence “the honest muttering” in our heads, for we do so at our collective peril.
In potentially bewildering times, we are mindful of the ‘dissenting voice’ in our own tradition. This is not to advocate being awkward for the sake of being awkward, nor to condone dissension for its own sake. It is to recognise that if we ignore “the honest muttering” in our heads, we run the danger of being swept along with a tide of opinion or action that ultimately we cannot own, and of which we need to “repent, and turn again”. By the grace of God it is never too late to do just that, but the trail of damage left can be considerable.
At the heart of the Bible much is written about Wisdom. If we are to be discerning and wise Christian disciples, we need to be especially attuned to the honest muttering in our heads, and find the courage and grace to speak and act accordingly.
We may be listened to, or ignored, but we will have made our contribution. Sometimes the clamouring voices or the tide of opinion may be within our local or wider church context. I have recently been reminded of Wesley’s sermon on the Catholic Spirit in which he breathed fresh life into II Kings 10.15: "Is your heart true to mine, as my heart is to yours?
If so, …give me your hand." Wesley himself placed great emphasis on the power of Christian conferring as a means of grace. Having celebrated the Scriptures in 2011, we would do well to remind ourselves of this particular means of grace in 2012.
Liz Smith