THE SILENCE

                      

 


When I first attended a seriously Anglo-Catholic church, St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, I shall never forget the effect of the veiled images and especially the empty tabernacle on Holy Saturday. An astonishing sense of desolation. Nobody home. Abandonment. We know it's not so, really, but oh, the feeling of grief. The world, sure, lives as if there were no God; but then, thousands of Romans and even Jews went about their business normally on a certain Friday. But this is what it would be like if there really was no God. Tabernacles empty. Nobody home. Only us, on a spinning ball.

Maranatha . . . . . .

PERHAPS TO SING

HYMN

(tune: Melcombe)

The daily round, the common task

Are not enough for what we ask:

No Martha chose to cook the meal;

The hours of thought are what we steal.

The world is too much with us yet:

We little give and little get;

We lean to keep an even keel;

The hours of thought are what we steal.

Images swirl and whorl and sway

And tempt our eye to fill our day;

We see the world behind the wheel --

The hours of thought are what we steal.

The shouted words of angry men

Pretend that hell is come again

And order us to think them real;

The hours of thought are what we steal.

In hush of waking, barely heard,

Comes murmuring the living Word;

Rich thieves, in gratitude we kneel:

The hours of prayer are what we steal.

R.K.

(with a hat tip to John Keble and William Wordsworth)