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A LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDED OF THE PEOPLE
It doesn’t matter much.Sing it in colloquial, Church Slavonic,
Double Dutch. It’s all Greek unless
We feel the flicker of the angels’ tongues
Weaving a language from the elements:
East light outpoured, words’ texture, gesture; sense.
© Chris Fewings 2010
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Editor’s Notes
1. I offer a couple of links, which you may or not find helpful (or impertinent). I love Chris’s writing, which is both spare and full of echoes at the same time, rather like T S Eliot. So (please forgive, Chris): ‘understanded of the people‘; Church Slavonic.
2. This is Chris’s website, which I urge you to explore.
Here is what he says about his writing:
In my writing and reading I explore
- delight in our unbuilt environment
- resistance to its destruction
- science as wonder
- religion as poetry and metaphor as insight
- the sixth great extinction
- death as part of life
- life beyond despair
- a self as big as the earth
- the desire to control ‘nature’ and other people
- delight in poetry and language
A couple of my articles have appeared in the Guardian newspaper, on translating concepts between belief systems and on ego and interdependence.
3. The illustration is ‘Angel of Light Clouds’ by Jonathan Miller, downloaded from the Twelve Baskets website under licence.
Lovely. I went through the Latin/English switch after Vatican II and found such depth in liturgy in the vernacular. Now I have trouble trying to figure out my British friends’ lingo in order that we can work together. But the language of God is one that we hear in all tongues. Elizabethan or Texan.
I *lurve* the quotes in the sidebar of your blog, Lauren. I hope Laura will publish them as a post on this site soon – they’re like cairns for a journey. I’m going to post the first one on my site forthwith, and follow it up with a poem what I wrote on a train long ago about poetry and theology.
And, I say, what ho, old chap, terribly pleased to see an old gal like you from the colonies reading our English blogs! You simply must drop in for tea and scones. Toodle pip!
Her’s the little poem I mentioned “When the angel of theology meets the girl poetry”. Wrote it 5 years ago and still haven’t got a decent title!