“Cleansing the Temple” Malcolm Guite

Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath.

Laity Lodge has just published their retreat schedule for this summer! What a thrill. To that end, I’d like to share a bit of poetry from one of the speakers who, one day, I hope to meet.

On being told my poetry was found in a broken photocopier By Malcolm Guite

My poetry is jamming your machine
It broke the photo-copier, I’m to blame,
With pictures copied from a world unseen.

My poem is in the works -I’m on the scene
We free my verse, and I confess my shame,
My poetry is jamming your machine.

Though you berate me with what might have been,
You stop to read the poem, just the same,
And pictures, copied from a world unseen,

Subvert the icons on your mental screen
And open windows with a whispered name;
My poetry is jamming your machine.

For chosen words can change the things they mean
And set the once-familiar world aflame
With pictures copied from a world unseen

The mental props give way, on which you lean
The world you see will never be the same,
My poetry is jamming your machine
With pictures copied from a world unseen

Also: A lovely video from Laity Lodge wherein Guite recites his poem.

I first heard these bits of C.S. Lewis brought together in a talk by the poet Rev Malcolm Guite. I've often since thought that they help explain the prayer from Psalm 86:11:

Teach me Your way, O Lord, that I will walk in Your truth; bind my heart to fear Your name.

From Surprised by Joy:¹

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-sided sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Reason²
BY C.S. LEWIS³

Set on the soul's acropolis the reason stands
A virgin, arm'd, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason. But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded and her pains are long, and her delight.
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination's dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say, and not deceive,
Then wholly say, that I B E L I E V E.

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

—George Herbert

Thanks to poet Malcolm Guite for mentioning this poem during a conversation hosted by the Trinity Forum.

by Malcolm Guite

Here is a meeting made of hidden joys
Of lightenings cloistered in a narrow place
From quiet hearts the sudden flame of praise
And in the womb the quickening kick of grace.
Two women on the very edge of things
Unnoticed and unknown to men of power
But in their flesh the hidden Spirit sings
And in their lives the buds of blessing flower.
And Mary stands with all we call ‘too young’,
Elizabeth with all called ‘past their prime’
They sing today for all the great unsung
Women who turned eternity to time
Favoured of heaven, outcast on the earth
Prophets who bring the best in us to birth.