Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: crucifix, David Scott, poetry, san damiano, St Clare, St Francis
Up a steep hill and out of town,
looked after by a shuffling, aproned verger
doubling as a housekeeper to the priest
was Ripon’s Roman Catholic Church,
St Wilfred’s; where Lord Ripon lit the first
eager candles of his conversion.
Was it there that the idea first came to him
to buy back San Damiano’s from the State,
at a time when places such as those
were realising very low prices?
He thought of all the place had meant to him
(cicadas, cypress, thyme,
the ancient conjunction of wood and stone,
the lack of any compulsion to respond)
when he had visited there with his friend
and water-colourist, WB Richmond.
The Count of Cavour would have knocked it down,
used the benches for levering gun carriages
out of the mud in his fight against the Austrians,
and stolen the brittle, silver hair,
probably not St Clare’s, and used it
for stuffing King Victor Emmanuel’s footstool.
But there, Francis heard the crucifix speak,
and Clare wrote letters to Blessed Agnes of Prague
signing herself ‘useless handmaid’.
For these and other reasons, Lord Ripon paid
all those noughts of lires
arguing over the exchange of currency
and mistranslations, so that the nuns
could filter back under no pressure to be useful.
San Damiano’s, the place where Francis wrote
Il Cantico di Frate Sole, under its Yorkshire landlord
was returned to an acre of grace.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: David Scott, poetry, prayer, simplicity
I have only the agony
of knowing I have little,
and the slow job of resisting
any attempt to make it more, because
in my mind’s eye I have the eye of the needle,
and how easy it is for even
licked thread to miss getting through.
From A Priest at the Door by David Scott
My heart goes walking
to the ancient places,
Jerusalem, Lindisfarne,
holy places all. Prayer
can take me there:
to the foot of the cross,
to the edge of the world,
to the eye of the Buddha,
the muezzin, the kestrel
hovering over the motorway,
and my heart can go thwack
to another heart as quick
as silicon, but
bringing it back…
- David Scott
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brandwood, David Scott, George Herbert, poetry, prayer, resources, Slowing Down, St Bede's, urban ministry
The last few weeks have been frantically busy. This has been for a number of good reasons and I am happy as a priest to work to the limits of my capacity at particular times. The danger for me lies in getting into a pattern where I work flat out all the time, become exhausted and then a liability. Walking the Camino, along with a commitment to walking and cycling in life, has been enormously important in ensuring I keep a proper shape in my life. I am enjoying an emptier diary this week, a chance to stretch, to reflect on and process all the busy-ness.
One of the important things that has been happening is discerning the direction of the next few years at St Bede’s, Brandwood, where I spend half my work as Vicar. 
We have been using the Diocese of Birmingham’s excellent Transforming Church initiative to help us in this. Over the last months, folk at St Bede’s have gathered together a list of all the ideas of things we would like to do. On Saturday, about twenty of us spent a day in prayerful discernment. We prayed for our parish and then looked at what we already do. We then considered future work. We are already active in our local community through our Community Project, particularly in working in partnership with local agencies and people of goodwill to give a better quality of life to all (click here to read the story of this). We are committed to this and especially to a youth work initiative that will be getting off the ground in the next few months. We also need to pay some attention to our finances so that all that we do and are is on a secure footing.
When we came to look at what else we might do, I was very happy that the mind of the meeting was to give attention to our life of prayer, both as individuals and corporately as a Church. We do pray at the moment, but this will be an opportunity to deepen this part of our life in Christ. It is also an opportunity for integration, to see that prayer and action are part of a seamless robe, that our mission is holistic, caring for all of a person’s being and needs. This became clearer than ever to me in that School of Prayer and School of Charity which is the Camino de Santiago. On it, we learn to pray more deeply; that prayer is tested and proved in our encounters with others, especially when it is difficult.
Here are two poems on prayer which give much to live out of:
PRAYER. (I) (by George Herbert)
PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
A Priest at Prayer
From prayer to prayer involves
a dwindling, a way of being
that accounts for weariness, a regular
drawing in and letting out of breath;
the planting of a word and its forgetting,
a close examination of what is there
until it isn’t, a candle flame beating air,
love meeting Love before the house wakes up;
space body-shaped, time vacated,
the passive tense, a waiting to receive,
out-of-bounds of what is right
or wrong, subject to being surprised
by God on briefest sight.
from David Scott Selected Poems.
