I sense a space I am at home in

 

The priest-poet David Scott has been a background voice through all my ministry.  His first collection was published in the year I was first ordained, and I learn that he died last month three weeks after I retired.  More importantly, I recognised so much his poetry revealed, from his early boarding school experience to his enigmatic pastoral encounters.

I’ve been re-reading much of his work over the last few days, including his poems in memory of a teacher we just happened to have shared to a friend whose life had changed his perspective:

...  The outer life is burnt or buried on a particular date,

but faith flies away from there, to become something suddenly other.. 

...  Now I tell the secret that resurrection is the glass through which we see differently, and what was first in the mind of God becomes the truth at last.

But, rather than this predictable choice from among the many places where he references looking beyond death, it is the title poem from his final collection Beyond the drift which echoes for me most tonight. 

He had contrasted his brother’s smudged left-handed writing with the clarity of his own right-handed ability to pull his pen ahead of the letters, until ‘becoming left-handed in my soul’ every poetic venture is owned as ‘unclear, slow, unsure of what it is to know’, concluding:

...  Beyond the drift of language I sense a space I am at home in; which is the mystery of the heart, wordless, patient, and wrong.  Being right seems insufficient now. 

And a poignancy in all this, of which I wouldn’t have been aware other than through his publisher’s announcement of his death, that he had been cared for with Alzheimer’s in the last few years.

Two Lincoln Cathedral pictures tonight as well.  Unexpectedly finding a Spitfire parked when coming in for Evensong last night, and remembering being installed as a Canon twenty years ago today.