New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

There are several reasons why I elected to go to St Bueno’s in the silence of the welsh hills as the place for my recent retreat, but one stands out more clearly than any other. I have long been totally smitten with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – much of whose early work was conceived whilst living at St Bueno’s from 1874 to 1877.

For more than thirty years, when it has come to choosing which books I will take with me on travels around the world - my literary comforters - it has been Hopkins ‘Complete Poems’ which has won hands down (though Walt Whitman, T S Elliot and more recently R S Thomas have become hot contenders – yes, OK, and about twenty others!).

One Hopkins poem which I committed to heart back in the late 1970s has been an especially important companion. It is entitled ‘Heaven Haven’ and reads as follows:

HEAVEN-HAVEN
A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
______

As I write it, I easily relish the beauty of it all over again. Over the years I have felt it speak into my experience on a variety of occasions: sometimes interpreting what I have been feeling at a particular moment, sometimes opening up aspirations for futures as yet unformed - and it has done both these things exceedingly well. But in the last few months, I have found myself reading it an entirely different way from ever before – which transforms its potential significance both as interpreter and inspirer of my life in the future.

It seems odd now that I should have read it over so many years essentially as an invitation to retreat – in the sense of ‘retreat from’ the hurly-burly of daily life into the shelter of a monastic house, literally ‘out of the swing of the sea’. It had taught me to think of a potential calling to contemplative prayer primarily in terms of withdrawal, escape from the torment of the world’s unrest, into a peaceful place, where ‘storms’ never even get a look in.

But for a number of reasons, probably beginning with a prompt from Thomas Merton, and beginning to see Hopkins through the wider lens of his extended writings, I come to see the contemplative possibility in an entirely fresh light; not escape at all, but actually an energetic resource for engagement of the most robust kind – as Merton demonstrated in his extraordinary dialectic of monastic devotion and extreme political activism.

It is not at all difficult to manage a reading of the manifesto set out in the first stanza in this way. It can easily be read as an invitation, not to an external place of escape, the monastic cell, but as retreat into an essentially internal haven of peace through the inner life, a truly deep peace. This, by way of contrast, is a haven which does not rely on the shelter of a monastery at all; it can travel wherever a disciple is called to go. It can refer to a deep inner peace which ‘passes all understanding’ and which nothing has power to disturb. This is what contemplatives seek through the achievement of profound inner stillness and, as Merton writes, can be achieved even in the presence of any kind of external noise.

But what of the second stanza? Surely this cannot be forced to surrender a similar interpretation? Surely it does contain a request akin to ‘get me to a nunnery!’, “… to be … out of the swing of the sea”? Well, not necessarily. Try this – the request is again for inner peace where, even if storms are all around, they are unable to break in. Such inner peace is like the ‘green swell’ of leaf burst in spring which rises up out of a depth and can become the energy of true stillness; and the green swell actually rises up ‘in the havens dumb’, the still centre, and ‘out of the swing of the sea’, not in the sense of ‘external to it’, but rather, energised by its very movement, literally 'out from within it'. The request in the second stanza then becomes like that in the first – to know a deep inner peace in the midst of any and every external turmoil. It becomes a possible basis around which to live a life of total stillness and total engagement - simultaneously.

Now it might just be that every other reader has read it this way all along – but I for one never saw it! The result has been that this poem, wonderful as it has been, has falsely fed my instinct to seek tranquillity by escape; indeed, I thought that was what I was searching out through ‘elected silence’ at St Bueno’s. Whereas the truth of it has become the possibility of something very different – the discovery of peace, yes; stillness, yes; but stillness which might never need a place like St Bueno’s again. It has begun to build ‘a mobile peace’ which can travel with me to the ends of the earth, with the possibility of enduring all things and surviving all things.

I am glad to have this new reading, because this is the kind of peace I now realise I deeply want.