Under a Broad Sky by Ronald Blythe

Author:Ronald Blythe [Blythe, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Life, Spiritual Growth, Spirituality
ISBN: 9781848254749
Google: ka4LAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Canterbury Press
Published: 2013-09-27T23:25:19.141951+00:00

At Eventide

THE CONCLUSION of a Christian day. The still-fierce sun drains the light from the altar candles. They waver, pale and milky. The heavy presence of summer flowers. The giant oaken knight and his successive oaken wives raise imploring stumps. Ora pro nobis. The reformers lopped off their praying hands. Some 30 of us sing evensong: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord’.

The young priest who has been a prison chaplain all day is in the congregation. I should have said the prayer which asks God to pour upon him ‘the continual dew of thy blessing’. But I say the evening prayer with which Robert Louis Stevenson ended the day in Samoa.

‘Our guard is relieved, the service of the day is over, and the hour come to rest. We resign into thy hands our sleeping bodies, our cold hearths, and opened doors. Give us to awake with smiles … make bright this house of our habitation.’

Most days this week, I have sat outside this house of my habitation, listening to the late birds, pondering the reduction of a wild garden. For, as the Preacher did not say, there is a time for cutting beds and a time for the grassing-in of beds. But what a business it is. The deed is partly done, however, and I have the aches to prove it. Also, it looks surprisingly nice.

Which is why I am sitting where generations of farmers rested in July. Their hay was in, their corn stood high. And they ached and ached and ached, and it was somehow blissful to be seated in the fading light with a blackbird calling. To rest. It was warm, it would soon be dark. Just over the wall, the animals rustled themselves into sleeping positions; just over the hill, the flock faded from sight. It was Abrahamic.

I give myself a little drink, having no idea what a unit is. The white cat looks down from a column. St John’s wort blazes away, having, it was said, been given a double dose of the sun. When, as I usually do, I used a sprig of it to lighten my Baptist sermon, the churchwarden told me that it was a weed, and what a bother it was to dig it out. The saint, said his bereaved Cousin, ‘Was light – a burning and a shining light.’

Friends telephone, and trust that they are not disturbing me. Once, having to supply an address and gone to the study, I lose the phone itself until I hear it crying from a flower pot. ‘What are you doing?’ ask the friends. Nothing. I am seated at the entrance to my tent, waiting for angels to come over the hill.

‘What? Are you all right? Did you watch Wimbledon?’ How can one say on the phone that one is praying? It is so unreasonable. Or that one is wonderfully worn-out with gardening. George Herbert was wonderfully worn-out with music and words and God and just being alive, and with singing his evening window-hymn, because so much had to be compressed into so few years.

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