Postage stamp. Great Britain. Queen Elizabeth II. 1980. Famous Authoresses. George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss. Christmas Day can be a celebration constructed year by year according to inner desire and individual memory. Like a nativity set where the main cast, Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are carefully stage managed into central positions in the crib, so too planned festivities may be set according to our wishful self. And if last year’s Christmas Day was not quite perfection, a king may accidentally have suffered back breakage so now in place of his red robe is a large hole (as happened with one of my childhood pieces) then he is newly situated so his back merges into an appropriately sized stone. Defects of any sort can be disguised, overlooked, ignored. The endeavour to create a Christmas Day luncheon that is flawless may involve all sorts of conscious or unconscious subterfuge. This year there will surely be more care so that the tinsel, the crackers, the best tablecloth speak of not just perfection but human happiness to the full.   In her novel The Mill on the Floss , George Eliot depicts and then subverts such a view born from a Victorian idealisation of Christmas.  After his first term at school, feeling discouraged and diminished, Tom Tulliver returns home for Christmas. George Eliot details a scene which is picture perfect to the very best old-fashioned English Christmas Card: ‘Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.’   But look closer at the scene and there is a hint of melancholy: ‘there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.’ Such ‘sorrow’ born by the cold is excused as ‘old Christmas’ devising a way to bring families together around the warm hearth, ‘to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred.’ Yet, the narrator goes on, poverty also exists, and some people have no warm hearth, cannot afford a hearty meal. However, the reason for this is known only to Christmas’ own father, whose name is Time. And Time, she tells us, ‘still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.’ Nothing more is said, but the acknowledgement is significant. The picture-perfect Christmas exists only in the mind.   Everything this Christmas for young Tom is in place as in the past, ‘the red berries were just as abundant on the holly’ and the ‘singing under the windows just after midnight’, and the ‘plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever’. Tom’s own efforts to be realistic in all things remains, and he reminds his sister Maggie who hears the midnight chant as ‘supernatural singing’, that they were simply ‘old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir.’   But something new begins to oppress Tom Tulliver. His enjoyment of nuts and wine is distracted by his father’s irritation. As the Christmas meal and its leisure progresses so does his father’s anger and defiance increase.  Recently a neighbour living further up the river has begun to limit the irrigation of water to his father’s Mill.  This exploitation becomes the pivot for the main events in the subsequent action of the novel, but here Tom’s consciousness is newly awakened to the fact that ‘that there were rascally enemies in the world, and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted without a good deal of quarrelling.’   The Mill on the Floss  was one of George Eliot’s early novels, published in 1860 when she was 41.  Her perceptions of our human foibles are, even at this stage, astute and often entertaining. Her prose can be sharp and witty, assessing human character with outrageous fun. But she is equally compassionate. All her characters, even Mr Wakem the solicitor who represents the lawsuit against Mr Tulliver’s fight to restore his due water supply, is rescued from being the devil that Tulliver accuses him to be by his sensitivity to his own son, Philip’s physical deformity and love for Maggie. No character is written off or found irredeemable. Even when tragedy descends.   Christmas is not a fixed ideal, but as George Eliot knows, it is like life itself always in process and change. Its festivities invite us to be open to hear the many discordant tones of life, as well as harmonious. The birth of Christ in a manger in a simple barn, is not a comfortable or ideal birth setting for any child, much as we may try to decorate it with golden tinsel and sparkly angels. It is a setting which ought to disturb and unsettle. Just as quarrels with our neighbour or family member unsettle us, so too the knowledge that there are many who cannot afford the luxury of a Christmas meal or be with family and friends, who are lonely, broken, or terrorised in war zones ought to be discomforting. This awareness and acknowledgement are part of the meaning of Christmas. And, like Tom Tulliver over his Christmas meal, we may not be able to do anything more than keep this awareness at the edge of our own perception.   Every Christmas, Christ is born into a new setting.  A barn, a family living room, on the streets or in a squat, this setting is birth of the grace and compassion of God’s love for all creation, all humanity.  The essence of the nativity is in the heat and longing of God’s love which flows into time and abides in a world that is not perfect. I am glad that a broken King in my childhood nativity set taught me this, and authors like George Eliot illustrate it too. In places of pain and suffering, there is also glory and surprise.

A paper published in 'Heroes of the Faith: 55 men and women whose lives have proclaimed Christ and inspired the faith of others' (TMA, 2015: 56-63). Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations' second Secretary-General (1953-1961), was a devout Christian whose faith gave him the courage to lead the UN through some dangerous years of the Cold War. Writer, teacher and bookshop manager, Carol O'Connor pays tribute to this remarkable diplomat and man of faith, who died prematurely in suspicious circumstances. “I don’t know who - or what - put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer yes to someone - or something - and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back,’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow’.” Words of Dag Hammarskjöld written at Pentecost 1961, a few months before his tragic and untimely death. He consciously affirmed and surrendered in faith to something in the universe bigger than himself. This saying Yes illumined a Way, a path in life for him. This is a moment that resonates for many people of faith, the memory of a pivotal moment whereby it is felt that something inside oneself that has been resisting, finally is let go of, and assent is given. This assent brings meaning, clarification about one’s own goals and strivings. In March, Miroslav Volf spoke in Melbourne about human beings living in two distinct systems, that of faith and politics. These systems overlap but are nevertheless distinct. To live authentically, a human being needs to give priority to the world of faith. Volf says, “to be in creation is to be in reference to God.” This reminds me of Hammarskjöld in his work as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations (1953-1961). His biographer Roger Lipsey has put it well: “Hammarskjöld knew two unlike worlds very well. The world of politics and political leaders, deception and honesty, violence and kindness, reflection and the search for solutions. And another world: a world of inwardness and prayer, of self-scrutiny and ancient wisdom, of periodic return to a centre of stillness surrounded by silence that nourishes, situates and restores. In the first world, he was nearly always with people. In the second, nearly always alone with his own person and his God. In both worlds he was a lifelong inquirer with initiative; it wasn’t enough to pass through, contributing cautious splashes of oneself here and there. In the world at large, he strove to summon the best of himself, look carefully and imaginatively, and act as wisely as possible.” When we observe his actions as UN leader, e.g. his passionate belief in personal dialogue with world leaders at critical moments in a nation’s history, we see this took immense courage and integrity on his part. Hammarskjöld was breaking new ground for the budding organisation. Though always strictly adhering to the UN charter, he helped forge and grow the unique character of UN nations at a particularly early and vulnerable stage of its development in the cold war. Where did he get his insight from? Where did he get his courage? What sustained and nourished him? Given that we have, I think, a paucity of leaders with such depth today, I wanted to know more about him. But also, how do each of us translate our inner dialogue, our ‘negotiations with ourselves and with God’ into our everyday world? For Hammarskjöld, as for me, that God is the Christian God, the centre of which is Love. It’s the Trinitarian God of Father/Mother, Son and Spirit. How can we with more conscious awareness transcribe our inner life in God, relationship with Jesus, into our own actions in our lives? Dag Hammarskjöld was born July 29th 1905, the youngest of four sons. He grew up in a castle in Uppsala built by King Gustav Vasa in 1545, one of Sweden’s oldest and most historic castles. Below the castle stands the school he attended. And on the other side is the brick gothic Lutheran Cathedral which he attended with his family. The Castle is ten minutes by foot from the University, and not far from the university library. Hammarskjöld’s family moved in soon after his birth, and lived there for almost quarter of a century, until his father retired as Governor of Uppsala. He continued to live with his parents when they left the castle. It was only at the age of 40, five years after his mother’s death, as he was about to transfer to the Foreign Office, that he established his own home. Hammarskjöld had a privileged, and on one level cloistered childhood. The family was of the old nobility. Dag’s father (1862-1953) was a scholar in philology, law and government. He was the first delegate to the second Peace Conference at The Hague. Viewed, himself, as a non-party participant in international affairs, he was so successful that the King summoned him to form a Cabinet and he was Prime Minister through most of the First World War, managing to keep Sweden neutral. From his father, Dag inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country, or humanity. Dag came to be influenced strongly by his father’s non-partisan position in political affairs and eventually took his place, quite literally his chair, seat No. 17, in the Swedish Academy in 1954. In his speech when he took his father’s chair he spoke of him with respect and admiration. In 1917, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom moved to the Cathedral and close friendships developed between the two families. Overtime Söderblom, himself was one of the original founders of the Ecumenical Movement for Christian Unity, became a mentor for Hammarskjöld. He strove to bring a Christian perspective onto social, political and international issues. The guidance of Söderblom would have countenanced another lifelong influence, Axel Hägerström, a fierce and formidable atheist professor of philosophy who taught him at University. Where Hammarskjöld came to value the intellectual rigour, language and method Hägerström disciplined into his thinking, he came to reject Hägerström’s demolition of medieval Christian mystics and complete dismissal of spiritual experience. Still today it is unexplained how and why Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed over the Congo, as he travelled to speak with Moise Tishombe, a Congolese politician. When he died only one person, his friend Leif Belfrage, knew about his personal journal, Markings. A few years before, Hammarskjöld had asked Leif that if he died, could he please receive the book and see if it were something worth publishing. A letter to this effect was inside the journal, which was found by his bedside in his New York apartment after his death. Markings is a diary, described by its author as a book “concerning my negotiations with myself - and with God.” At the beginning, he quotes Meister Eckhart: Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. So It was a journal that was read and reworked by its writer over time. As a child, Hammarskjöld had a great interest in biology. Carl Linnaeus, originator of taxonomy and professor of botany at Uppsala mid-18th century was an inspiration. Linnaeus also had found spiritual renewal by exploring mountains in the Swedish far north. In 1957, Hammarskjöld said: ‘With the creative power of the poet (Linnaeus) showed us how better to capture and hold the elusive experience of the moment in the net of language…A great naturalist guided the author, but a great poet permitted the scholar to peer into the secret council chamber of God.’ Linnaeus had a mind that liked classifications, minute details. He had a fascination with the natural world, as well as a passion for broad ideas, open spaces. Hammarskjöld’s words Numen semper adest (The divine is breaking in around us) is a reference to Linnaeus, who had the words: Innocue vivite, numen adest (a line from Ovid’s Art of Love , ‘Live innocently, the divine is always breaking in’) placed in a prominent place in his home. Hammarskjöld read widely: Otto’s Idea of the Holy, Schweitzer, Pascal, Thomas A Kempis, Hesse, Conrad. The writings of the Christian mystics increasingly interested him. He gave a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing to David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel in 1953. He loved Saint John of the Cross. Later he was to meet with Martin Buber and on that last fateful trip was several chapters into translating I and Thou from the German and English, into Swedish. Hammarsjköld wasn’t one of the leading candidates for the UN position. The offer came out of the blue, for him and others. He was thought a good middle of the road candidate from neutral Sweden, who wasn’t a member of any political party and spoke four languages fluently. He was a quiet,reserved man with moral integrity, intelligence, knowledge and experience in foreign affairs who, it was thought, would toe the line. They didn’t know what they were in for. And in truth, it looks like Hammarskjöld didn’t know either. In 1956 Hammarskjöld wrote in Markings: The road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. Hammarskjöld brought a new character, a moral force to the United Nations. His first move as Secretary-General was to tackle the presence of the FBI within the House. The era of what he called “McCarthy-ish hysteria” had led to suspicion and mistrust of many members being secret Communist sympathisers. For Hammarskjöld, the presence of the FBI could only create dysfunction and he found ways for its removal. As well as believing in the integrity of its members, Hammarskjöld espoused the independence of the United Nations as vital for its health and proper functioning. In 1954 he remarked that ‘sometimes (the Secretary-General) will have to voice the wishes of the peoples against this or that government.’ Maintaining this attitude gained him respect, but not popularity in all quarters - particularly amongst the world superpowers. Hammarskjöld believed that when you have a problem with someone, you talk face to face with that person. Translated into the international political scene, talking directly with world leaders in times of tension or high conflict took courage on his part. Initially, his approach was viewed as novel, or reckless, but later vindicated in what became known as the Peking Formula. In 1957, China took 11 US airman, and 2 CIA agents hostage. Hammarskjöld took the extraordinary measure of travelling to Beijing (Peking) to negotiate their release. He kept these negotiations confidential; discretion, particularly with the media, was vital. He worked in terms of developing a personal connection with Premier Zhou Enlai and sought commonality of interests and understanding. There was no immediate outcome, and his comments to the US press were characteristically evasive and brilliantly diplomatic. But some months later, on his 50th birthday, he was informed in a letter from Zhou that the hostages were released as a birthday gift. ‘Leave it to Dag’ became a catchphrase in the late 1950s. With similar strategic diplomacy and personal approach during the Suez Canal crisis, he persuaded Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Egypt’s President Nasser to accept the UN peace keeping corps to work out peaceful means of differences. Hammarskjöld got results. But these results came at a cost. He was always an advocate for the smaller developing nations, much to the chagrin of the super powers. When Belgium released its imperial control over the Congo in 1960, it left the nation ill-prepared for self-government and vulnerable to exploitation by the US, Russia and France. There were many valuable minerals of interest there, not least uranium. Initially, UN ambassadors brought in peace troops and sought constructive dialogue between vying factional leaders, but they were struggling. One UN representative and his wife had to be recalled back to the US for fear of assassination by Congolese politicians. The CIA had a presence and the Soviet Union had spies. These were volatile and dangerous times. Eventually, Hammarskjöld decided to personally travel to Ndola, a Rhodesian mining city, and mediate a dialogue between two of the major Congolese leaders - Tishombe and Adoula . Although cease fires were never guaranteed on either side, he thought it looked hopeful that some sort of constructive outcome would eventuate, and that the gradual withdrawal of UN troops from the Congo would be possible (by that stage 17000 troops from 20 different countries). To this day the nature of that last fatal air crash for Hammarskjöld and his crew remain problematic. Not least the reason for deliberate tardiness of response by European heads in Rhodesia once it was evident that the plane had crashed, and the fact that the autopsy report had subsequently been destroyed. Hammarskjöld was thrown free from the crash and appears to have been alive at that point. In 2012, an independent commission, instituted by a committee from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, found there is sufficient evidence to warrant a new US investigation into whether Hammarskjöld’s plane was shot down or had a bomb planted within before it crashed. Dag Hammarskjöld was both an idealist, and a realist. He believed that the world could be a better place, but was not naïve to the risks involved in accepting the responsibility to make it so. His aspiration was for all nations, large and small, to work together with peaceful interdependence. Hammarskjöld always worked hard and was totally dedicated to his professional responsibilities, particularly during difficult periods, e.g. as discussions became more difficult during the Congo crisis, he went to bed at 5am and was up working by 9am. For rest and relaxation he liked to translate. In June 1961, friend and artist, Bo Beskow, reports these words from Hammarskj: "If I have one unsolvable problem to think of night and day, I can manage. And even if I have two or three at the same time - but when they start multiplying my brain starts to boil. I simply have to find something to translate. But what?" That what , became Buber’s I and Thou. That Hammarkjöld found translation a means of relaxation tells us something about him. It was calming to translate words from one language to another, to move across languages, ideas, worlds, ideas. He enjoyed seeing connections, bringing together that which is in disparate places. It is as if he was hard-wired to seek out the impartial position. It is the fitting place of someone who is most comfortable working with the bigger picture as well as the fine details and who is working for world peace. Markings, or Vagmarken in Swedish, has a certain meaning. They are trail marks, cairns - the piles of stones a climber leaves to mark his progress on an uncharted mountain. These piles of rocks aid the climber in his descent, so he should know his way and not lose direction. These words we encounter in Hammarskjold’s journal are the word shapes of a man who wanted to signify certain points in his life. Why? He often felt he was pushing limits at the frontier of the unheard of, in Swedish v id gransen or det oerhorda - oerhorda , meaning, the unheard of, or, the ineffable, unfathomable, inapprehensible, hidden, latent, numinous. The first thing explorers want to do when they enter an unknown landscape is to chart their course; map out the territory they are going through so they can find their way back. And also show others what they have discovered. Markings is the record of a pathway through Hammarskjöld’s own life. It reveals a man who finds himself a little like Job, struggling and working through suffering out there in the wilderness of the white northern mountains with his God. Like Job, it’s the testament of a man who is attempting to live authentically in the times that he finds himself in, the spiritual struggles inside of himself. Hammarskjöld constantly opens himself to self-scrutiny and cross-examination. Just as Markings kept his inner journey on track, he used the UN Charter to keep his role as Secretary General of the UN in check. During difficult times of conflict within the House, he always referred back to it as the place where he gleaned discernment and justification for his decisions. He drew strength from the charter in his work for impartiality amongst all nations, particularly the smaller ones under threat by the super powers. We see this particularly in the later years with the aggressive, eroding stance taken by the Soviets. Just as he let go in a spiritual sense, in Markings , to his Christian God, with the UN he would let go in terms of requesting the House as a whole to vote on contentious issues. In both the private and public sphere he sought to walk a path that was being revealed to him, but also in some sense he was surrendering to. He was both in control, and surrendering that control. So both Markings and the UN Charter gave him signposts. Each was a compass, representing something to which he held himself accountable. I conclude with his own concluding words at Pentecost 1961: “Lead by the Ariadne’s thread of my answer through the labyrinth of life, I came to a time and place where I realised that the way leads to a triumph, that the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation (or humility). After that, the word ‘courage’ lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me. “As I continued along the way, I learned, step by step, word by word, that behind every saying of the hero of the Gospels stands one man and one man’s experience. Also behind the prayer that the cup might pass from him and his promise to drink it. Also behind each of the words from the Cross.” Full paper and quotes can be found on the Carmelite Library Blog.

A paper delivered at the Carmelite Centre, Middlepark on Tuesday 21 June 2016, for the Spiritual Reading Group. If there’s an Ur-language still among us, hiding out like a pygmy pterodactyl in the woods, sighted at daybreak sometimes, perched on a telephone wire, or like prehistoric fish discovered in ocean’s deepest grottoes, then it’s the exclamation, universal whatever the sound, the triumphant, wondering, infant utterance, ‘This! This!’, showing and proffering the thing, anything, the affirmation before the naming. Robert Creely, American poet and close friend of Denise Levertov, has written: ‘The exceptional grace - a dancer’s I liked to think - of (Denise Levertov’s) work, the movement so particular to a complex of thought and feeling accomplished a rare unity. That unique quality is present in all she does…’ Each time I have felt myself getting stuck, or more frequently lost in writing this piece on Denise Levertov, I have returned to spend time with her poetry. There she continues to give me something fresh, wakes me up to the world a little more. And there too it’s as if, gently admonishing, she has sent me back into my floating thoughts, back to my blank screen, and pressed me forward on a track; wondering, enticed. It’s a good creaturely way to move with such a graceful poet dancer. Denise Levertov believed that her poetry was ‘testimonies of life lived.’ She called language ‘her Jerusalem.’ Her poetry was born out of her life. In all, she wrote 24 volumes of poetry, 4 volumes of essays and 8 translations. There is also a substantial body of correspondence and personal letters, diaries and notebooks. Her writing continued to be throughout her life piercing with insight, alive to her imagination and attentively wrought. As in her own lived life, her poetry and poetics evolved. Memories and apprehensions of life, like layers of soil being built up over time, became mixed with new understanding and insight. In this presentation I shall be looking at her later poetry for this very reason - in them can still be detected the early strata of her early work. Denise Levertov was born in England in 1923 and died in America in 1997. Her father, Paul Levertoff, was a Russian born Jew. He descended from Shneour Zalman, a Russian founding father of the Habad branch of Hasidism. When Paul converted to Christianity he was ostracised by his family, and chose to leave Russia after finishing University to make his own way in the world as a teacher and academic. Denise’s mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, was Welsh born. She was orphaned at a young age and brought up by relatives who were strict Congregationalists. As an adult she travelled and then studied under Paul Levertoff’s supervision in Constantinople. They married in 1911 and moved to London. There, as Anglican priest, Paul Levertoff worked in a London Church of England Parish, but he was also the Director of the East London Centre for Jews and a member of the Hebrew Christian Church. Later, Levertov described them as ‘exotic birds in the plain English coppice of Ilford, Essex.’ She called her mother, who was a naturalist and artist, a ‘pointer outer’. Beatrice planted the seed for Levertov’s own call to ‘pay attention’ to all things, to movements and changes in the natural world. For Denise, this also translated to attentiveness to fine tunings within the self. And it’s a call she extends to us, as reader or listener of her poetry. The final poem in the last book of her poetry, (Sands of the Well 1996) published in her lifetime: Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes, caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, You still hour by hour sustain it Although from a very young age Denise Levertov declared herself to be an agnostic, she nonetheless, celebrated ‘mystery’ and later attributed her keen sense of ‘wonder’ and ‘marvels’ to her own childhood education in Hasidism. Dana Greene in her comprehensive biography of Levertov writes: from a young age we see that Levertov ‘ discovered mystery in the divine sparks of the Hasidism and in her search for “inscape.”’ But it wasn’t only her Jewish heritage which had a lifelong influence on her writing about wonder. Greene goes on to say: ‘” The ‘negative capability” of Keats, the “disinterested intensity” of Rilke, the “dialogical relationships” of Buber, each brought her closer to its revelation……(the) search for mystery is everywhere in her poetry, but she claimed not to have belief. She considered herself a “syncretist or a dilettante of religions”.’There was a spirit in Denise Levertov from a very young age which sought expression through writing poetry, but refused to be contained. Words became Levertov’s primary and lifelong interest. At the end of her life she lamented that the English working vocabulary in America was shrinking. She herself wrote her first poem at the age of 5, dictating it to her older sister Olga. At the age of 11 she sent a poem to TS Eliot who was then Editor of The Criterion. Though he did not publish the poem, he took the time to write back to her and advised to keep writing poetry and translate of other poets. Rilke, was one of a number of poets she translated and went back to again and again for inspiration throughout her life. Levertov was mainly home schooled by her mother. Their house was filled with books. As she grew up increasingly she enjoyed solitary visits to London galleries and museums; places that become repositories to feed her awakening imagination. For a time as a young adult she pursued ballet, but then at 19 became a nurse. However, it was when she left England in 1948, aged 25, having married an American, Mitchell Goodman, that writing became her primary focus. The contemporary French phenomenologist, theologian and poet, Jean Louis Chretien, has written about interplay between the gaze, the speech and the silence. I have found the idea of this inter-movement, like a dance, a helpful way of working with Levertov’s poetry. It’s as if Levertov herself is performing a listening-gaze into silence. This act is with her whole self, her body, mind and spirit, and the action gives voice in words born from this. And once uttered, the words themselves seem to fall back into the unheard. According to Chretien, listening is prior to speaking, and ‘speaking does not dominate listening’, thus it provides a common space for community. So this act of listening-gaze into silence, is relational. Throughout her life a great deal of Levertov’s poetry celebrates the natural world. On one level you can read these poems as a celebration of nature and all its attendant nuances - exteriorily witnessed and inwardly apprehended. But when looked closer, what starts happening particularly in her later work, is even more delicately layered, more exceptionally nuanced. In her search to make meaning, there is a delicate balance and understanding between the poet as self-conscious perceiver perceiving, and that which is perceived being both perceived and also perceiving. The silence that rests in all of this, in the perceived and the perceiver, and the silence which enables the listening, precedes all. And this then is all then further mirrored in the world of the listener or reader - their interplay with the words, their gaze, their own listening. Last poem, published posthumously in This Great Unknowing: Aware When I opened the door I found the vine leaves speaking among themselves in abundant whispers. My presence made them hush their green breath, embarrassed, the way humans stand up, buttoning up their jackets, acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if the conversation had ended just before you arrived. I liked the glimpse I had, though, of their obscure gestures. I liked the sound of such private voices. Next time I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open the door by fractions, eavesdrop peacefully. For Chretien, silence, the unknown, is the ground of speech. And the first dimension of this silence is listening. ‘I opened the door / I found the vineleaves / speaking among themselves in abundant / whispers.’ Secondly, there is silence as response. Chretien says: ‘here the suspension of speech is still itself speech, an eloquent silence, a place of encounter and mutual presence.’ ‘My presence made them / hush their green breath.’ What do the plants do? They ‘button up their jackets, act as if they were leaving anyway’. Mutual encounter and response in silence. And thirdly, according to Chretien, speech as excess. Excess means ‘a surplus of content that defies our attempt at grasping it through our understanding.’ Speech becomes religious. It encounters the Divine. It becomes the Incarnate Word which redeems human silence and helps us listen for a Eucharistic excess in the cosmic silence. It leaves its traces in the ordinary, traces many of us have lost sight of, but still remain for those who are willing to ‘relearn the world.’ Here, for the poet: ‘Next time / I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open / the door by fractions, eavesdrop / peacefully.’ What is the poet wanting to hear? What does she think she will overhear in her eavesdropping? Is it such ‘excess’? We are left wondering too, what is it that we hear and do not hear in the world around us? This is a poem about the privileged articulated view of a listening-gaze into nature: ‘I liked the glimpse I had’, ‘I liked the sound’. And the poem itself becomes the explanation for its title, Aware. To be aware in the world is to be attuned to this interplay of gaze, silence and word. Attuned, and listening deeply. ​ From their outset in New York, Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman moved in cultured circles - bohemian, literary, academic and activist. A year after their marriage their only child, Nikolai, was born. Over the next 15 years Levertov formed close ties with older poets in particular William Carlos Williams and H.D., and also The Black Mountain Poets, those of her own generation, Robert Creely and Robert Duncan. In 1955 she became an American citizen. But these were also very difficult years. There were marital and financial problems, frustrations with her own irrepressible passions. She felt trapped and was not only concerned about the health of her parents and sister, but also experienced difficulties with her son. Mitch suffered depression and setbacks with his own writing. They moved around and lived in Mexico for a period. Nonetheless by the end of 1955 Levertov had really begun to make inroads into the American poetry scene. Very quickly, and uniquely for a woman at this time, she was establishing a name for herself. And a decade later she had 5 more published books of poetry and was now benefitting from public readings, fellowships and teaching positions. ​ For her 31st birthday Mitch gave Denise a two volume set of Buber’s Tales of Hasidism. In it they were delighted to read about her ancestor, Shneour Zalman. The work itself resonated with her mystic heritage. Buber’s writing was influential in other ways. From early on Levertov apprehended in life a ‘double image’ : joy and wonder, fear and promise. Buber helped further her imagination understand the self’s engagement with the interior terrain and exterior world. Also, the self’s connection with another self, with God, with the Other. Later, Thomas Didymus, or doubting Thomas, became one New Testament figure which helped in terms of exploring her own awakening Christian faith alongside doubt. She was discovering a place where faith and doubt could co-exist in art, as in the self. Central to the work of Chretien is the notion that the relationship between God, human and the world, is a calling forth, and a need for response. For Chretien, silence ‘opens us, wounds us spiritually and bodily, and summons us.’ During the 1960s and 1970s Levertov became actively involved in working for values of human justice; with protest groups she struggled for peace and care of the earth. She worked tirelessly, with Mitch, on anti-Vietnam War campaigns, and they were leading speakers for nuclear disarmanent groups and the environmental movement. She was arrested several times. Her poetry during this period reflects her social and political activism. Such public activism was not new to her. As a child her family had sheltered refugees. With her parents Levertov had publicly demonstrated against fascism. She had wanted to join the British communist party but was too young, resigning herself instead to simply selling The Daily Worker. But Levertov’s social activist spirit in the late 1960s and 1970s began to burn her out: ‘There is a cataract filming over / my inner eyes’ she writes in her poem Advent 1966. She felt as if a ‘monstrous insect / has entered my head.’ She had to Relearn the Alphabet. She recognised that her poetic space, writing and teaching, had to be her primary journey, not social activism. She also recognised that for her poetry was a craft and had a prophetic dimension, but it was not therapy or confessional. Amusingly in 1978 she said: ‘A poem is not vomit!...It is something very different from bodily purge.’ Poetry was organic, coming out of lived experience, which carefully uses shape and form, line break, rhythm, punctuation, indentation to articulate this intense experience like melody to the reader. The poet has an inner voice which seeks to articulate something pre-verbally intuited. This something is deeply personal which seeks to meet the personal in another. It is born ‘in the presence of a god.’ Levertov understood herself as ‘by nature, heritage and as an artist, forever a stranger and pilgrim.’ She understood herself as an ‘air plant,’ rootless, wandering, whilst remaining true to that instinct within herself to press on. In some ways she could never let anything go. She explored memories, kept a dream diary, reflected on her friendships. Accumulating knowledge, experience and understanding she would then seek to distil this into language. But by the mid-1970s her engagements with Anti-Vietnam War efforts had ceased with the end of the War, she finally broke off her marriage to Mitchell Goodman, and disconnected herself from Robert Duncan. During the years 1979-1982, Levertov wrote the long poem entitled: A Mass for the Day of St Thomas Didymus. The process of writing this poem she described as a conversion process. As with other poems written during this period, including El Salvador: Requiem and Celebration, such poems became vehicles through which she was able to wrestle with spiritual and theological issues. She now talked about poems which ‘enfaith’, in other words help birth faith in God. But conversion to Catholicism came slowly for her. Later she also attributed her conversion to the figures of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Oscar Romero. And before deciding on Catholicism she visited many churches, Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic in Boston and London. ​ The poem The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velazquez) is based on a 17th painting, 'The Kitchen Maid' or 'La Mulata' in Spanish, by Velazquez in 17th century. A mulata is a woman of mixed race. The word itself actually comes from the Spanish, la mula, which means ‘mule.’ Levertov would have been aware, there are two versions of this painting. One on display in Dublin, the one which Levertov had seen on a visit, and one in Chicago. In a 1933 cleaning of the Dublin painting, a depiction of the supper with Jesus at Emmaus was revealed. So before we even read this poem it’s of note that the painting itself is contextualised within two ideas of great interest to Levertov - the double: one painting has the Emmaus scene, the other doesn’t, and; the uncovering of the hidden, the not-seen becoming revealed. The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velazquez) She listens, listens, holding her breath. Surely that voice is his - the one who had looked at her, once, across the crowd, as no one had ever looked? Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her? Surely those hands were his, taking the platter of bread from hers just now? Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well? Surely that face-? The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy. The man whose body disappeared from its tomb. The man it was rumoured now some women had seen this morning, alive? Those who brought this stranger home to their table don’t recognize yet with whom they sit. But she in the kitchen, absently touching thewinejug she’s to take in, a young Black servant intently listening, swings round and sees the light around him and is sure. The poem itself refers to the story in Luke after the death of Jesus when Cleopas and another unnamed person are pondering recent events as they walk along the road of Emmaus. They meet Jesus who helps them understand the revelation of scripture more deeply, but they do not recognise him. They invite this stranger home for dinner and it is only at the end of this meal when he departs that they recognise him as Jesus. Levertov’s poem, like Velazquez’ painting, draws on two main themes in the Gospel story: the recognition of Jesus, and Jesus’ affirmation and inclusivity of the outsider. The scene painted by Velazquez is of a mulata slave whose body position is turned away from Jesus as she makes bread in an adjacent room. But her head is slightly turned towards him; she is overhearing his conversation, listening to ‘that voice’. Is this the man who had looked at the mixed raced servant, ‘once, across the crowd, / as no one had ever looked’? Chretien says that listening is a ‘truly palpitating activity, it can happen only with this heart that beats, this air breathed in and breathed out, this patient activity of the entire body. It is with all one’s body that one listens…The always unfinished truth of listening is a heartfelt truth.’ In order to truly identify Jesus, the servant girl has to hear the silence within herself to then verify the voice of someone who once ‘looked at her across the crowd’, who had ‘seen’ her. This is a seeing that is both interior as well as exterior. It’s happening within Jesus, and within the servant-girl. It’s the very memory of the sound of Jesus’ voice that recognises and affirms her. She remembers his past recognition of her own selfhood being shown to be worthy. In both instances he doesn’t even need to say her name and he doesn't even need to speak with words to her. But she holds back her breath, can’t let go of it until she is sure that it is him. She is in a gap space between heartbeats. Like Doubting Thomas she needs more evidence. And it is only she alone who can take that final bodily action to turn around and see. To answer this call, she must risk all. She: swings round and sees the light around him and is sure That Jesus has already recognised the mulata and his hosts, from the very start, is assumed by the poet. Here again we have listening-gaze: a perceiver perceiving, and the perceived - Jesus -is also perceiver. Jesus is recognised in the poem as the recogniser of all; though he sits with those who are still blind to the truth of his identity. His table is a Eucharistic gathering. The whole poem, like the painting, is centralised and sacramentalised in him. And, in both poem and painting, the Eucharist is at its centre, yet placed off-centre stage. This is a Jesus who seems to be in the background, but actually is drawing everyone, including the reader or viewer, to Him, and to God. Both poem and painting are titled The Servant Girl, but everything is actually directed toward Jesus. He invites inclusion and identity for everyone, including the servant girl at a much greater feast, the Eucharist. At the end of the poem, though she is still doubly excluded from society - by her class, and her race - through the risen Christ she is given recognition, affirmation and belonging in the kingdom of God. Levertov wrote this poem in 1987. She herself is that servant girl at Emmaus. Her past and present are depicted there. She described herself as a ‘mongrel’. Before she could dare to swing round, look at the Christ squarely, she had to find the courage to ‘risk all’. She was becoming much more attuned to this newly transformed, yet ever ancient, inner voice she had always heard and trusted, but never quite in this way before. Though she had always known that the visible and the invisible, and the audible and inaudible are not rigidly separated, she was coming to understand the nature of excess that is poured out from the silence. However, right up until her death in 1997 Levertov remained adamant in the distinction that she was a poet who was a mystic, not a mystic who was a poet. As Dana Green puts it, for her: ‘Mystic and artist were singular ways of being and distinctive vocations.’ But the distinction was becoming very blurred. ​ Levertov’s concern for social justice issues remained strong throughout her life. Invited to give a Pentecost sermon on Peace at the Cathedral Church of St Paul in Boston in 1988 she said: ‘If we neglect our inner lives, we destroy the sources of fruitful outer action. But if we do not act, our inner lives become mere monuments to egotism.’ In the 1980s she not only recognised poetry as her primary means for expressing social concerns but it is that space whereby the attunement of one’s whole self enables one to became more alive than ever. And as a pilgrim, she felt ever called to pressing out past the boundaries of self and journeying onwards into the unknown. In 1982 Levertov took up a teaching position at Stanford University, which became the Institution she ultimately sold all her correspondence and journals to and which house them still today. Although finally settling in Seattle, she continued to write poetry, read widely, ask questions, give talks, teach, and reflect on the craft of poetry in her journals, letters and books. In doing this she was also able to cover her own costs and look after the financial needs of her adult son, Nikolai, who at 33 was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Right up to her death in 1997, she was awarded honours and prizes. In these last 15 years of her life she became engaged with works such as The Cloud of Unknowing, and wrestled with the ideas of people such as Benedicta Ward, Anthony Bloom, Basil Pennington. Murray Bodo, the Franciscan father, became a spiritual mentor who advised and helped her in particular with her challenges with Nikolai. She worked with the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola with Lee Dapfer as her director. For ‘temperamental’ and ‘ideological’ reasons, she chose not to have a spiritual director, but Julian of Norwich became a nominal one. Impatient and irritable, by her own admission, Levertov had alienated many people in her life. However, as Dana Green comments: ‘The late 1980s were for Levertov a time of making peace and reconciling. Through imagination she restored a relationship with persons in the past and forged a link between her vocation as poet and Christian. The result was greater personal tranquillity and a desire to ‘clear the decks’ and risk a new beginning.’ As her own self was being transformed during the last 15 years of her life, immeasurable reconciliations began to place - with Mitch, with the memories of Robert Duncan and her family, with Adrienne Rich, and increasingly with Nikolai. Visitation. Overflow. 1 The slender evidence…… The you must take my word for it. The intake of a word. Its taste, cloud in the mouth. The presence, invisible, impalpable, air to outstretched arms, but voiced, tracked easily in room’s geography, among the maps, the gazing-window, door, fire, all in place, internal space immutable. The slenderness of evidence,narrow backed tapir undulating away on rainforest paths, eachtapir bearing a human soul. 2 Amazon basin, filling, overflowing spirits in every plant, in bark, in every animal, in juice of bark. Words taken by lips, tongue, teeth, throat, down into body’s caverns, toenter blood, bone, breath, as here: as here the presence next to that window, appearance known not to sight, to touch, but to hearing, yes, and yet appearing, apprehended in form, in color, by some sense unnamed, 3 moving slenderly doorwards, assured, re- assuring, leaving a trace, of certainty, promise broader than slender tapir’s disappearing sturdy back, the you can only take my word for it, a life, a phase, beyond the known geography, beyond familiar inward, outward, outward, inward. A ‘time and place’ (other terms unavailing) of learning, of casting off of dross, as when hunters steam off fur, skin, feathers in cauldrons, leaving the flesh to share with all, the humble feast, slender evidence, take it or leave it, I give you my word. Visitation. Overflow. was published posthumously, in the volume: This Great Unknowing. There are different ways to move with this poem. Words here are ingested, ‘taste, cloud in the mouth’. They are a visceral experience, but also ‘tracked easily / in a room’s geography’. They are heard and apprehended ‘by some sense unnamed.’ Words travel to become, ‘flesh to share with all’. This ‘humble / feast’ is a Eucharistic image. And it’s a feast centered on and flowing from the word / Word. The overflow that is born in the silence of the body helps us listen for Eucharistic excess born in the cosmic silence. It’s as if, by implication of the two full stops after each word, Visitation. Overflow. that the poem has two titles. They are two distinct happenings. By this, is Levertov trying to articulate something witnessed as being given and received from a place of unknowing that then is able to pour itself out? Or, does the gift itself continue to be given, feasted on, an overflowing? Here the Visitation and the overflow are one in the present moment, and go on endlessly in the poetic craft and the act of creation itself. When Christians hear the word ‘Visitation’, they think of Mary, who after being visited at the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel and pregnant with Jesus, went to see her pregnant cousin, Elizabeth. Through the recognition of the Christ Child by John, Elizabeth's unborn son, they are both filled with Divine Grace. In this poem the Incarnate Word is enfleshed within the self and it gives birth to poetic utterance. Its journey is like that of a ‘narrow backed / tapir undulating / away on / rainbow paths, each tapir bearing / a human soul.’ When I looked up ‘tapir’ I found that this animal is known as a peaceful wanderer, an endangered species, a shy hermit, a gentle, custodian of the forest, an animal that travels well-worn trails from dense undergrowth, a negotiator of forest paths. It’s journey in this poem is likened to ‘as when’: hunters steam off fur, skin, feathers in cauldrons, leaving the flesh to share with all, the humble feast, slender evidence, take it or leave it. I give you my word. The inner tapir is a creaturely spirit that walks through dense forest trails of self to find language, to then share with others. This is a poem as much about the birth of poetry as the birth of faith itself, within the body. The experience of this birth can only be known via taking the journey itself. The process can only be attested to with ‘slender evidence’ but is backed by the poet’s word. The Visitation is the bearing witness to this enfleshed word; the recognition that this process is dipped in the Divine. The Overflow is its consequent abundant and continuing lifegivingness. ​ In the last 10 years of her life Levertov had entered a place of much largesse of heart and word. The double image increasingly needed to break open. It is still there - Sojourns in a Parallel World, Writer and Reader. But it seeks break out into a ‘great choir’ or harmonies that combine to ‘make / waves and ripples of music’s ocean’. Levertov continued to struggle with many theological ideas: free will and a suffering world being primary preoccupations. She wrestled as well with the Catholic Church and its teachings, particularly birth control and abortion. But it was also a period where fiercely radical re-facing and re-visioning of her own life took place. As she asked hard intellectual and spiritual questions, she began to find answers in her own poetic space. It was a time whereby many threads of her life integrated and a new wholeness of self emerged. Her striving to love God became a slow recognition that in reality she was actually being offered God’s immense love for her. Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, Introduction by Eaven Boland, A New Directions Book, 2013 Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life, by Dana Greene, University of Illinois Press, 2012 Forrest Clingerman, Book Profile JCRT 6.1 December 2004: Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art by Jean-Louis Chretien, Translated by Stephen E Lewis Fordham University Press, 2003, & The Ark of Speech by Jean-Louis Chretien, Translated by Andrew Brown. Routledge 2004 PDF : www.jcrt.org >archives>clingerman

About Us About Us A Brief History Church Stories 2024 Church Stories 2025 For over 30 years the Australian Anglican Church Calendar has promoted and celebrated the diverse heritage of Australian Anglican church buildings. Robin Page’s stunning photographs continue to highlight the beauty and distinctiveness of the Anglican Church’s inheritance. Cathedrals, parish churches, chapels in the cities, suburbs, towns and the bush have been featured annually in its pages. Churches from the most historic to the very recent, across the traditions of Anglicanism, and in every state and territory are represented. Two centuries of church architecture are on show, from the most rudimentary tin construction to the most ornate neo-gothic pile. This unique calendar is a helpful reference listing the lectionary Sundays, colour coding the major and minor Feast Days in the Church’s year. One month is featured per page with boxes large enough to diarise events. The Australian Anglican Church Calendar is produced by St Peter’s Bookroom, a ministry of St Peter’s Anglican Church, Melbourne. The Calendar is designed and printed on sustainable resources in Australia. Please subscribe to our newslestter. ‘Like’ us on Facebook and help spread the world about Australia’s fine Anglican church heritage. Most of all, enjoy the beauty and inspiration of a new Australian Anglican Church photograph each month! Subscribe to our monthly newsletter. Name * Email Address * Thank You! Submit Australian Anglican Church Calendar PO Box 742 Macleod, VIC 3085 +61 400 334 882 info@stpetersbookroom.com.au

A Brief History About Us A Brief History Church Stories 2024 Church Stories 2025 When the Revd Geoffrey Cheong returned from working in Canada, sometime in the 1980s, he became vicar of St Augustine’s, Mentone. At that time, they were trying to save the Retreat House in Cheltenham from sale. The Retreat House had been in use for generations in Melbourne, so feelings were strong about its preservation. Geoff came up with the idea of a calendar as a fundraiser for the Retreat House. This idea was inspired by a similar calendar being produced annually in Canada. That calendar is still being produced, though we don’t need to worry about the text being bi-lingual in English and French. Those interested in saving the Retreat House, who would have included members of the Community of the Holy Name next door, adopted Geoff’s proposal. The calendar started being published out of the Mentone parish, the primary beneficiary from sales being the Retreat House and its work. When the Retreat House was eventually sold at the turn of the century, proceeds were directed to AngliCORD, or Anglican Overseas Aid. Management and publication went with Geoff Cheong after he became vicar of Holy Trinity, Balaclava and Elwood. Jenny and Stuart Allen took charge of production. In 2018, responsibility for production came to St Peter’s Eastern Hill, under the management of Helen Drummond. Then in 2021, the St Peter’s Bookroom, under the guidance of its Manager Carol O’Connor, adopted the Calendar as a publication project of the Bookroom. Robin and Jenny Page have travelled Australia-wide, taking photos of the featured churches. Robin is the photographer and Jenny maintains an excellent catalogue of Robin’s extensive collection. This is just as well considering the travel restraints due to the pandemic. In the 2002 Calendar, the tenth in the series, Robin wrote, “In my travels around Australia in search of Calendar stock it has been rewarding to see the great love that parishioners have for their churches and the efforts made to maintain the fabric and surrounds of these cherished buildings. I see my mission as going well beyond the commitment to providing images for the Calendar and more as one of preserving the wonderful heritage of our Australian Anglican Churches in some small way. My aim is to show these in their landscape and I thank the many folk who have understood my philosophy and written or spoken to me so supportingly over the years. For the technically minded all images are shot on 6cm x 6cm transparency stock using a Rolleiflex 6008 camera and, almost invariably, a Schneider 55mm Shift lens.”

Church Stories About Us A Brief History Church Stories 2024 Church Stories 2025 Stories from 2024 St John's Camden NSW January 2024 Radford College Chapel Bruce ACT February 2024 Christ Church Daylesford VIC March 2024 St Luke's Maylands WA April 2024 Holy Trinity Benalla VIC May 2024 St Paul's Naracoorte SA June 2024 St James the Great, Jamestown, SA July 2024 Coomalie Chapel, NT August 2024 St Michaels & All Angels, Kingaroy, QLD September 2024 St Jude's, Tumbarumba, NSW October 2024 All Souls' Sandringham, VIC November, 2024 St Luke's, Canungra, QLD December, 2024 Stories from 2025 Subscribe to Church Stories. Name * Email Address * Thank you! Submit