Category Archives: newsletter

The year of St Luke

newsletter,

As well as being the Year of Mercy and the Centenary year of our Archdiocese, we remember that in the Catholic Church the Sunday readings revolve around a three year cycle. This follows the Gospels of Sts Matthew, Mark and Luke – with bits of St John scattered here and there. So this year we are in the Year of Luke, through to the Feast of Christ the King in November.

The New Testament mentions Luke a few times, and the Letter to the Colossians refers to him as a doctor; so he is thought to have been both a physician and a disciple of St Paul. He was in Rome with Paul, as the Acts tell us. His style of writing, described by some as the most human of the evangelists, and ancient traditions that he painted portraits of Our Lady and others, have him also as an artist. Many think Our Lady was one of the original sources for His Gospel..

After some interest shown last week in the poetry of Malcolm Guite, here is his sonnet on St Luke.

His Gospel is itself a living creature
A ground and glory round the throne of God,
Where earth and heaven breather through human nature And One upon the throne sees it is good.
Luke is the living pillar of our healing,
A lowly ox, the servant of the four,
We turn his page to find his face revealing
The wonder and the welcome of the poor.
He breathes good news to all who bear a burden,
Good news to all who turn and try again,
The meek rejoice and prodigals find pardon,
A lost thief reaches paradise through pain,
The voiceless find their voice in every word
And, with our Lady, magnify the Lord.
From “Sounding the Seasons”, Malcolm Guite, 2012

St Mary Magdalen

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In this Year of Mercy, Pope Francis has raised 22nd July, when we remember St Mary Magdalen, from being a Memorial to a Feast (Gloria etc). She suffers from mistaken identity, being confused with the woman taken in adultery or the one who came in from the street, whereas the only reference to her past in the Gospels is that Jesus cast out 7 spirits from her. More importantly, she was a faithful disciple right to the Crucifixion. Then she was the first to meet the risen Lord, and so became the first to share the Good News – the “Apostle to the Apostles”.

Here Malcolm Guite, Anglican priest and poet based in Cambridge, writes about her in sonnet form.

Men called you light so as to load you down,
And burden you with their own weight of sin,
A woman forced to cover and contain
Those seven devils sent by Everyman.
But one man set you free and took your part,
One man knew and loved you to the core.
The broken alabaster of your heart
Revealed to him alone a hidden door,
Into a garden where the fountain sealed,
Could flow at last for him in healing tears,
Till, in another garden, he revealed
The perfect love that cast out all your fears,
And quickened you with love’s own sway and swing,
As light and lovely as the news you bring.

From “Sounding the Seasons”, Malcolm Guite, 2012

Mametz Wood

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This weekend we remember the taking of Mametz Wood, part of the Battle of the Somme, in which 600 Welsh soldiers died and thousands were wounded.

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin. This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

Copyright 2005 Owen Sheers, South Wales poet, author and presenter