A letter from Bewcastle – February 2025

Dear Friends,

Many people find poetry tedious and irrelevant. It can be dense, obscure, and lacking the narrative of a good story to keep you hooked. Much modern poetry has little or no rhyme, or obvious rhythm, which some find irritating. I understand this completely. For forty years I had absolutely no interest in the stuff. Perhaps it was because I was forced to memorise Wordsworth’s ‘The Daffodils’ at school, and just couldn’t see the point of it, but I was completely put off verse. Apart from limericks, of course. Who doesn’t smile at an amusing limerick!

That changed over a few months in 2003-4. When I had finished my ordination training in Durham, I took up a curacy in Upper Weardale, Co Durham. My training incumbent was Philip Greenhalgh, who went on to become the rector of these parishes a few years later. Every Wednesday we sung Evensong in Stanhope parish church. Instead of a sermon, Philip would read a selection of poems. I have to confess that, to begin with, I found this exceedingly dull. The words washed over my head as I looked around at the old wooden carvings on the choir stalls, or the ornate stained glass in the windows, or the Rugosa fossils in the black Frosterley Marble on the chancel floor. But after several weeks of time-wasting in this way, I decided to hang up my preconceptions and try to listen. So I closed my eyes and started doing the hard work of concentrating on the words. To my surprise, I found pictures being painted in my imagination. They weren’t coherent to begin with, but they were sharp, vivid, with a certain angle or ‘feel’ to them: ‘This darksome burn, horseback brown, his roll-rock highroad roaring down’, and there it was in my mind, a full, peaty burn bucking and tumbling down the fells off the rain-soaked moors, noisy and violent. As the weeks passed, I began to see the extraordinary skill these poets had in their surgically precise choice of unexpected adjectives or turn of phrase. And because of this, I found these lines began to open windows in my spirit and I started to catch glimpses of a reality I knew to be true, but that seemed elusive in the ordinariness of everyday life. The more I listened to these poets, the more I found my spirit being watered at an oasis in a dry and barren land, like a panting hart. ‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin.’ There it was again, that ache inside me as George Herbert nailed exactly how I felt in the presence of pure Love. I was beginning to ‘get the point’. From then on, I began to look forward to Wednesday evensong each week; it became my watering hole. It was the still place where I received a refreshing draught from God to carry on ministering in sometimes difficult circumstances. Among the many gifts I received from Philip, I think this love of poetry is the greatest. That, and a love of birds.

A few days ago I was in church on my own, kneeling on the chancel step having just prayed through the psalms set for the day. I decided to read a poem by RS Thomas. Thomas was a poet-priest who ministered in the mid Welsh valleys among the hill farmers in the second half of the 20th century. For me, though, he is also the priest’s poet because I have found no one who captures the loneliness of being a priest as well as he. The poem I read was called ‘The Prayer’. It is not long, but too long to recite here. I read it aloud slowly. It begins ‘He kneeled down…’ It goes on to speak of the emptiness of prayer. Towards the middle, ‘after the weather of his asking, no still, small voice, only the parade of ghosts, casualties of his past intercessions.’ I stopped. My heart choked up and I started sobbing uncontrollably. Those words were written for me. They expressed concisely and precisely the pain and grief and weight I felt, the heartache, the sorrow, the guilt and the disappointment, everything that goes with being a parish priest. My tears became my prayer. After a while I managed to compose myself, finished the poem, rose from my knees and left the church. The poem had become my communion with the God of Love that yet bids me welcome, even knowing my failures and shame.

I want to leave you with a short poem that Philip sent us this Christmas in his card by the Orkney poet Geroge Mackay Brown. It is called Lux Perpetua, which means Eternal Light, and is about the four stages of life.

A star for a cradle
Sun for plough and net
A fire for old stories
A candle for the dead

Lux perpetua
By such glimmers we seek you.

Your friend and priest,

Robert