John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Means of survival

Churches Weekly Newsletter - No.157, 23 April 2023

Everyday I think about dying,
about plague, war, famine,
global warming, the end of the world.
It helps keep my mind off things.

It made me happy when my selection of Roger McGough's verses were well-received, among the many excellent presentations, at last week's Poetry, Prose, Pies, Peas and Puddings evening. So here's a couple more. 

Survivor, above, typifies McGough's quiet wit and gentle wisdom. The last line's playful reversal offers us release from the anxiety of living in a broken world we feel helpless to change, whilst quietly suggesting that it's enough that we deal with those 'things' which test us every day. Echoes of Jesus' soothing end to the Sermon on the Mount:  “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

In another poem Roger McGough expresses gratitude towards his Liverpool-Irish Catholicism, in celebrating one thing which helps him get through each day. We might relate to this too....

To Religion

Thank you, Religion, for helping me believe
that I am living a charmed life.
Touch wood, no disasters so far. I've

more friends than foes, four children and a wife
who is always at the heart of things.
Pay my dues and chance a prayer to keep them safe.

In times of despair an alarm bell rings
and I wonder if perhaps it's all a con.
But then somewhere within, a small voice sings.

Mumbo jumbo? Before I can tell, it's gone.
Brainwashed? You're in my DNA? We've
no idea. Against the odds we soldier on.

People cleverer than me think I'm naive,
that God is dead. That when it ends, it ends.
But thank you, Religion, for helping me believe.

'Survivor' is published in Roger McGough, Collected Poems, Penguin 2004.
'To Religion' is published in Roger McGough, That Awkward Age, Penguin 2010.

The dead are not under the earth

Churches Weekly Newsletter: No.156, 16 April 2023

Those who have died have never, never left
The dead are not under the earth
They are in the rustling trees
They are in the groaning woods
They are in the crying grass,
They are in the moaning rocks
The dead are not under the earth.

– Ysaye Barnwell, 'Breaths', Sweet Honey in the Rock, 1988

This time each year my mind always turns towards my grandmother Edna Jones whose birthday was 15 April. My Yorkshire grandmother, the daughter of a Bingley cobbler, who as a young woman moved with her parents to Liverpool, where they set up a shoe shop in suburban Waterloo: my eventual birthplace. 

When Ysaye Barnwell sings “The dead are not under the earth,” she is of course being figurative. Edna's ashes went to earth back in the 1980s, mercifully some years before that other indelible 15th April event, the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989, which shook our community to the core, and would have shaken Edna so, as she loved her sport, its people and its traditions. Each FA Cup Final day Edna would gather the family in her living room where we would watch the game together, followed by a ham tea.

But in her song Barnwell is inviting us to consider these questions: Where do you find your ancestors? How do relationships with generations back continue to nurture your life? What traditions do you hold around your ancestors, practices which are still part of your life?

These are good Eastertime questions, encouraging us to look for signs of resurrection in the details of our daily lives, to consider how those who have gone before us continue to shape some aspects of our characters.

I find Edna less in 'the rustling trees... the groaning woods' of this place, and more in the inflections of some West Yorkshire womens' voices, their terse and vigorously expressive ways of speaking; and I find something of her spirit too, in the solidarity I have (and I'm certain she would have had) with the families of those whose loved ones went to watch a football match that April day, and never returned, in their search for recognition and justice in the face of 'the patronising disposition of unaccountable power', as Bishop James Jones later put it in a government report. Now, years after that report's publication, there are plans to introduce a Hillsborough Law, with a so-called Independent Public Advocate to support families caught up in major disasters.

(thanks to Geez magazine for the 'Breaths' references)