The Power of Poetry

Last Sunday we had a visiting speaker at church and he was sharing some of his story of how he came to faith at the age of seventeen. When he was about ten or eleven years of age his teacher gave his class a poem to take home and read.
The next day the boys' responses were moans and groans..."Boring...why do we have to read this stuff?...What's it supposed to mean?" Er, sounds rather familiar.
Honestly, sometimes I've wondered if I was wasting my time reading and discussing poetry, especially with my boys, who have tended to be more vocal than the girls when it comes to their likes and dislikes in this area.
Well, our visiting speaker continued with his story and I noticed one of my boys looking across at me with a grin on his face as the speaker, in a deep, rich and dramatic voice, started to recite the following poem:

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked   

   And figs grew upon thorn,   

Some moment when the moon was blood   

   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

   And ears like errant wings,   

The devil’s walking parody   

   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

   Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,   

   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

   One far fierce hour and sweet:   

There was a shout about my ears,

   And palms before my feet. 

 by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

The speaker shared how his teacher simply talked about the poem - this creature was a freak of nature, unplanned, unwanted, weird, a parody; but he had a part in God's purposes.
I was so excited! Here was someone who understood the power of poetry. Here he was in his sixties still feeling the power of a piece of poetry he'd heard as a boy. 

A seed was sown in his heart by a caring teacher and God worked on that seed and seven years later it bore fruit in his life.
I was so grateful that my kids heard this story. I'm so grateful that I pressed on and continued to share poetry with them even when they didn't seem to appreciate it.
And this morning, I found a quote in one of the comments on my post on G.K. Chesterton from Mama Squirrel which I just had to put here:

"Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health." ~~ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

Linking to Weekends with Chesterton.

G.K. Chesterton and Humour

My initiation into the world of G.K. Chesterton was through his works of fiction or fantasy novels.

A Man Called Thursday was the beginning for me. I'd bought the book and everyone else in the family over the age of twelve read it and kept telling me I should. So I did eventually and got to the end still wondering what it was all about, but thinking it was a seriously good read.

The Father Brown series came next and then The Quotable Chesterton: The Wit and Wisdom of G.K.Chesterton by Kevin Belmonte. 

This book has about 870 quotations arranged in alphabetical order and showcases what an important writer and thinker this man was, and what a wonderful sense of humour he had.

I've been reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill and the very first sentence in Chapter 1 says:

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it until the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

Later, in Book II, Chapter 1, a young politician confronts King Auberon:

"What does it all mean?...

Are you mad?"

"Not in the least," replied the King, pleasantly. "Madmen are always serious; 

they go mad from lack of humour."

It got me thinking that many of us take ourselves too seriously; we don't know how to laugh at ourselves. We take offence at things that really should just be laughed off.

When I think about the madmen of history - Pol Pot, Stalin, Idi Amin, Hitler, to name a few - it's difficult to imagine that any sense of humour ever resided in any of them and the idea of them having laughed at themselves is inconceivable.

"Humour can get in the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”

Linking up with Weekends with Chesterton

The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason

The subtitle of this book is, Meditations on the Miracle,and it is essentially a meditative book - exquisitely so - and completely different to most books you would find on this subject, Christian or otherwise. 

J.I. Packer introduces the book by saying that if the author, a recently married student of his who wanted to be a writer, had spoken to him about using marriage as the theme of his first book, he would have pointed out that:

'Marriage...is a terribly difficult topic on which to write wisely and well...that the Christian world is already full of bad books in marriage...that young authors rarely write with any depth about relationships anyway...' etc.

However, Mike Mason did not consult him about what he planned to do, went ahead and wrote the book and the result, according to J.I. Packer, was an outstanding achievement:

Rarely...has a new book roused in me so much enthusiasm as has the combination of wisdom, depth, dignity, and glow - I don't know what else to call it - that I find in these chapters...

Their tone quality, resonating as it does off the Bible as its sounding board, is richer than we are used to...

This is one of those books that you need to go back and mull over. I've underlined so many parts of this book and there's so much I could share but at risk of transcribing the whole thing, I'll limit myself to a few quotes:

  

A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one's living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going - to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door - the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic: but also, let's face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.

What is most unique about the tenacious fidelity of marriage is that it allows for such a really brutal amount of "sharpening" to take place, yet in the gentlest way imaginable. Who ever heard of being sharpened against a warm, familiar body of flesh? Only the Lord could have devised such an awesomely tender and heartwarming means for men and women to be made into swords.

The Lord God made woman out of man's side and closed up place with flesh, but in marriage He reopens this empty, aching place in man and begins the process of putting the woman back again...

Marriage involves a continuous daily renewal of a decision which, since it is of such a staggering order as to be humanly impossible to make, can only be made through the grace of God.

To put it simply, marriage is a relationship far more engrossing than we want it to be. It always turns out to be more than we bargained for. It is disturbingly intense, disruptively involving, and that is exactly the way it was designed to be.

The Mystery of Marriage was first published in 1985 by Multnomah Books.

February Nature Study

We did our monthly reading from Amy Mack's Bush Calendar




And we read about Insects, Invertebrate Animals Other Than Insects and Spiders from sections of Anna Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study and also from William Gillies' Australian Nature Study books.

An Early Morning Encounter Between a Rock Wallaby and our Cat

I think this is an 'air plant,' Tillandsia, also known as Spanish Moss and Old Man's Beard. Part of the bromeliad family, they absorb all their moisture and nutrients through their leaves, thus the idea that they live on air. This was growing in bushland near our place but it's originally a native of the Americas.

This tree has been in our garden for many years. I knew it was some kind of tropical native but I only just found out its name: Buckinghamia celsissima, commonly known as the ivory curl, and is part of the plant family Proteaceae. It's an Australian native originally from North East Queensland.

The Flowers appear in Summer and last until Autumn

The Tree

We had a garden party for our daughter's 21st birthday and I went out the day before and bought some petunias and pansies to brighten up parts of the garden. We spent an afternoon planting and cleaning up and the next day, the day of the party, I went outside to find all the flowers had been eaten from the pansies, except two pots at the front door. The culprit was the rock wallaby above.

In the space of about two weeks we found two funnel web spiders - outside, thankfully, but still too close for comfort. This one below was already dead when we found him but the other one was speedily dispatched with the aid of a stiff yard broom. Our local hospital accepts donations of live spiders for obtaining anti-venom but I'm not at that stage yet - I freak out at the thought of them sitting beside me in the car as I drive them to their destination. We live in a hot spot for these spiders but since the introduction of an anti-venom in 1981 there have been no deaths recorded from their bites. We hadn't seen any for quite a few years and I wonder if our chooks (now deceased) kept them away.

Sydney Funnel Web Spider (Atrax robustus)

Atrax robustus

Atrax robustus

 

"Nature study is learning those things in Nature that are best worth knowing, to the end of doing those things that make life most worth living."

(Form the Introduction to Nature Studies in Australia by William Gillies and Robert Hall)