1.
A Poem is....
....a stained glass window
Shards of light deftly cutting
Through thick black lines
That meander over sheets of fierce colour
Their slow lead riverlets of words
Thick lines that sometimes dissolve
In a sunburst
Or spread out into solid pools
Of intense darkness
Ink spilled by a palsied hand.
*
Words are my store of colours,
The pictorial music of language
Engraved upon a flat surface
In the silence of my room.
Even the chimes of the studio clock
Are stopped while I am working.
Words are sacred
And must be given space to sound in.
*
A stream of sunlight
Filtered through amber glass
Covers my hand
Spreads translucent patterns over sheets of blank paper.
I recollect a frosty Easter Morning,
The burnished pavements inside Chartres Cathedral
Shimmering through a mirage of blue and yellow,
Dreams and reality merging.
A poem is....
------
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 12th. - December 5th. 2014. - February 1st. - 12th. - 13th. 2015.
October 7th. 2015.
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2.
Beauvais Cathedrale
Beauvais Cathedrale,
Broken, but perfect also.
Symbol of the martyred saints,
Fragile, but true to purpose.
A casket of light
In the depths of the city.
Only L`eglise Sainte Jeanne-d`Arc
Shining like a beacon in the market place
Of the inland port of Rouen,
Reveals a delicate, sublime grace
More perfect in it`s constancy.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 2nd. - 10th. 2015.
Candlemass.
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I Have No Easy Refuge.
3.
I am a Christian, but I do not hide behind my faith from the vicissitudes of life, the realities presented to humanity by profound scientific research and discovery. I have no easy refuge, no infantile sense of certainty in my personal salvation, only God knows if I am in a state of grace or not. The silences of God can be terrifying, more desolate than the arid world view of simple minded atheism, but they are a part of everyday reality and we must accept them. We must not try to fill the void with false concepts of God based upon our petty human requirements, our limited view of the world and beyond. My duty is to serve, and not to hide behind a simplistic image of God. I believe that Jesus was everything that He said He was, no more no less. I also accept the special calling of the saints, while not agreeing that every person canonized by The Church was indeed a saint. My duty in life is to help people as best I can by bringing a little kindness and understanding into their lives; I am very much a devotee of both Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Siena in this regard.
We should love our critics and our enemies as well as our friends, forgive the wrongs with which they burden us us; a hard responsibility but a responsibility that we must take up for the sake of our children and all future generations. I respect other faiths because our minds are far too small to fully understand God and all aspects of reality. Our various vocabularies are not large enough to express one single accurate vision of the world as it really is, nor are they ever likely to become so. It is a gross impertinence to believe in the supreme importance of mankind within the universe, and the imperative for mankind to fully understand the universe, but at the same time every human life is sacred, and to take a life, whether the killing is the result of a private tragedy, an act of war, or an execution sanctioned by a state, is murder. I say this, although among the saints that I specifically venerate I include Saint Joan and the uncannonized Simone Weil, two marvelously spiritual women of genius who became profoundly, momentously involved in hideous wars. They stood up against evil in the only ways that were practical for people possessed of such extraordinary talents in their war torn eras; and that we must always do, whatever our abilities, wherever we are and whatever the consequences. To be brave in the service of love is the only way to be truly alive. And what in fact is evil? I would include any form of racism, not giving equal human rights to all members of society, be they male or female; violence against people who hold opinions different from our own, be they religious or secular; violence against the innocent and vulnerable, especially children and those with disabilities; amassing great wealth at the expense of other people and to the detriment of the environment; any type of slavery; the upholding of unjust laws. I also consider iconoclasts to be evil, those who destroy churches, temples, mosques,and great works of art, just because they represent a different point of view from that of the destroyer.All of these evils are symptoms of a limited vision, an inability to open our hearts and minds to the other. To quote W H Auden, "We must love one another or die". Yes, to be a true, traditional Catholic Christian, Roman or otherwise, there can be no hiding place from the realities of life, our small part in the complex nature of the universe and beyond. God is our strength and refuge, but we are also expected to be honest, humane and brave. The refuge of God is a hard place to inhabit.
My mother, who in late middle age converted to Anglo - Catholicism, initially brought me up to be a sceptic, a free thinker; but when I reached the age of eight she sent me to the local Baptist Chapel on Sunday afternoons. I loathed the place. The preacher bored me to tears. I had already attended both Russian Orthodox and Anglican services, and had been deeply impressed by these experiences, but I was not entirely comfortable with either of these institutions. When I visited a relative in Paris, she would on a Sunday take me either to St. Denis or Rouen Cathedral. I was completely happy with the Latin Mass, and felt that I had been blessed. When I got back home to London however, I was subjected to a barrage of anti Catholic sentiment that left me feeling confused and unable to know what to believe or who to trust. The upshot of all this was that I took the easy way out and became an agnostic, but not for long; the memory of those Latin Masses quietly shadowed my thinking.
As a young man I was a rebel, fighting hard to establish my place in the world, but at the same time feeling culturally rootless. I was living in England, but I did not feel completely at home there. I have always sensed that my true home is in France, but I have remained in London for most of my life. I forced myself to become more English than I felt. I studied English painters and composers, becoming a fan of Purcell, Vaughn Williams and Tallis; I soon lost the understanding of the French language that as a child had been natural to me. But I have never learned to think like a dyed in the wool Englishman, and for this reason I remain a committed European. Nationalists, such as the followers of UKIP, are anathema to me.
I may have espoused agnosticism in my late teens, but I never stopped searching for a philosophy or a religion that I could personally relate to; love as one loves a close friend. I was not lazy enough to become a non thinking materialist; and although I love science, I have always thought it to be too closely allied to mechanics to be intrinsically moral. Science and higher mathematics are aesthetically pleasing, but it is important that we do not confuse aesthetics with morality, but alas, many people seem to do just that. So I studied Eastern religions in depth, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, thinking, without making strict comparisons, that they must be more profound than their Western counterparts. I also read the Koran with intense interest; but it was not until I discovered the Cloud of Unknowing, that great book of Christian mysticism, that I began to feel that I was moving onto home ground, a place always at risk of being lost, but somehow kept intact by the intensity of faith. I had no knowledge of the European mystics until I read that book, but once I began to study the mystics,both medieval and modern, I rapidly ceased to be an agnostic and, against my will, slowly, ever so slowly, became a practising Christian.
This period of gradual conversion was a very difficult time in my life. I felt that I was rejecting the clear cut, materialistic, modern civilization that I had been born into for a more complex, almost medieval view of the world.When I was a callow teenager I would join my friends mocking the Christians preaching at Speakers Corner. I found their language far too simplistic to convey any of the truths of the Gospel; because even then I realized that there are great truths expressed in the New Testament texts, but they are truths to struggle with, not to dilute to the brink of meaninglessness in emotionally enunciated sound bites. I already understood that human languages are too limited to express the concept of God, and that it is this lack of a suitable vocabulary that makes atheism such an attractive idea. It is a very easy idea to understand, and therefore does not need to be studied in depth. I had not yet learned that the person of Christ, and the lives of the saints, show us the very face of God. Or that much of God that Human Beings can dare to understand. It is the Glory that needs to be expressed through human nature to be even partially understandable; otherwise it remains distant, out of reach, deeply incomprehensible. The wonders of the universe, the beauty of transcendent art such as the quire of Meaux Cathedral, can only hint at this, but the face of the suffering Christ shows us everything that we need to know. The mystics taught me this, not the preachers in Hyde Park forever shouting "Jesus Saves". It is not my business to presume that I have been saved, but it is my business to be guided by faith and to try and live a righteous life.
I am very much of the Catholic tradition, but attached to the Anglican Communion. Within my experience members of the Anglo Catholic tradition tend to be more forward thinking than many a populist Evangelical.Within my experience Anglo Catholics tend to be more intellectual, more introspective,more spiritual, more open to radical ideas than Calvinistic protestants, those somewhat dour descendants of the developers of modern day capitalism.I would say that at this moment in my life my beliefs are finely balanced between those of the Anglo Catholic and the Roman Catholic denominations. Both these communions, (there is only one universal church after all, a fact we should never forget), allow me to ask questions. If I cannot ask questions I cannot be fully mindful of God. The only problem that I have with the Roman Catholic Church is that I fully endorse women priests and bishops, a point of view that the Vatican is unlikely to accept for a very long time. Many years ago I was received into the Roman Catholic Church, but because that Church will not ordain women, I have had to become, a not entirely uncritical, member of the Anglican Family, a situation that has given me great heart ache. The refuge of God is a hard place to inhabit.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 6th. - 8th. - 10th. 2015.
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