Among the leaves the small birds sing;
The crow of the cock commands awaking:
In solitude, for company.
Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible:
In solitude, for company.
The crow of the cock commands awaking;
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding:
In solitude, for company.
Men of their neighbours become sensible;
God bless the Realm, God bless the People:
In solitude, for company.
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding;
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning:
In solitude, for company.
God bless the Realm, God bless the People;
God bless this green world temporal:
In solitude, for company.
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning;
Among the leaves the small birds sing:
In solitude, for company.
Together Apart
We pray together apart. We’re together even sheltering in place. We feel the presence of one another the way I feel the presence of God sometimes, as an absence.
Yesterday, I said Morning Prayer with someone I haven’t seen at all, a fellow Anglican priest whose writing put me on the Canterbury trail. We commemorate John Donne on the date of his death, March 31st (1631). Born January 22nd 1572, Donne’s poetry mesmerizes. Donne was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London (the church Christine served as Priest Vicar and Chaplain). His romantic poems are theological. His Holy Sonnets are erotic. Because obviously, as kids say these days. Theology is desire or a waste of time.
As preachers go, Donne was a rock star. “Old St Paul’s” — Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s replaced it after the Great Fire of London — was one of the longest churches in the world, and when Donne mounted the pulpit the cathedral was standing room only. He and Lancelot Andrewes, the other spellbinding preacher in London at the time, were supple interpreters of biblical Hebrew and Greek. Andrewes oversaw the translation project that produced the Authorized (‘King James’) Version of the Bible.
I just read that 1,040 people died of coronavirus today in America. In December 1623 when Donne wrote Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions two hundred people were dying of a contagion in London every week. Gravely ill, he was sure life was handing him his walking papers. Meditation XVII is one of twenty three meditations. Each consists of three parts: the meditation, the expostulation, and a prayer. This passage from Meditation XVII is unforgettable:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.