Making Connections: Poems from an English Pilgrimage

Poems

Featured Poet: Jane Beal, University of La Verne

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2022): 3-19

Jane Beal (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) is Professor of English Literature at the University of La Verne in southern California. Her poetry collections include Sanctuary (2008), Rising (2015), and Song of the Selkie (2020) as well as seven haiku micro-chaps, Journey, Garden, Bliss, Wide Awake and Dreaming, In the Santa Cruz Mountains, Songs of Water, and Wilderness. She is the creator of three audio recording projects combining poetry and music, “Songs from the Secret Life,” “Love-Song,” and with her brother, saxophonist and composer Andrew Beal, “The Jazz Bird.” Her fiction is published in Crux Literary Journal, Dappled Things, Literature Today, Pacific Review, The Voices Project, two anthologies, Law & Disorder (2014) and Draw Down the Moon (2022), and her book, Eight Stories from Undiscovered Countries (2009). Her creative nonfiction includes biographies of women writers, published in Gale’s British Writers and American Writers series, and articles on the history and practice of midwifery in Midwifery Today. Her lyric essays appear in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, Impermanent Earth, Liturgy for the World, The Nightingale, The Remembered Arts Journal, The Right Words, Snapdragon, and the essay anthology, Laments (2020). Her academic writings, including eight books and forty peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters, focus primarily on a medieval history of the world, the Polychronicon; an exquisitely beautiful, fourteenthcentury, dream vision poem, Pearl; and the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien. To learn more about her work, please visit https://janebeal.wordpress.com.

How I Write Poetry of Faith:

I wish it were easy to express how I write poetry at all, let alone poetry of faith. I tried once, in an essay called “Cultivating a Creative Life” (Cantos, Spring 2014 issue). There, I shared what is for me the core principle of creativity, which is making in imitation of the Creator: the Lord is the Artist, and I am an artist, made imago Dei, imitating divine creativity whenever I create anything, but especially when I am inspired by the Spirit. Listening prayer, lectio divina, and spiritual direction provide spiritual foundations not only for my life, but my art, and these in turn support my creative practices: in the world of Nature, walking, birdwatching, and caring for creation; in the world of Art, contemplating visual artwork, listening to music, and reading for inspiration; and in the embrace of Community, gathering together, enjoying performances, and witnessing Glory, in extraordinary moments, like when a woman gives birth, which I have seen many times, because I am a midwife as well as a poet. My spiritual foundations and creative practices help to cultivate a creative life from which poetry of faith can emerge. For me, Jesus (whose name means salvation) is the cornerstone of the creative life. The Scripture says: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Psalm 118:22). Jesus is the cornerstone who holds my spiritual foundation in place, and the whole house of my creativity is built on it. Cultivating a creative life has meant opening the doors to the home of my heart to allow the redemptive process of God to work in me and through me. The art that has come out as a result is the flower of the Lord’s cultivation. In my life, I have made it my aim to cooperate actively with the Gardener. For I am his artwork, and my life is his garden.

MAKING CONNECTIONS Poems from an English Pilgrimage

London * Cambridge * Ely * Norwich * Chester * North Wales * Leeds

Part I: In the Middle of Things in Norwich

In the Garden of St. Julian’s Church

I step through the gate into the quiet garden, the secret sanctuary beside St. Julian’s Church.

In the solitude of a summer’s day, I move toward the sweet sound of a tiny robin.

He flits under leaves, and perches on bracken, and when I whistle a little, he comes out to look around.

There he is! Sweet, small, and perfect, peering up as the afternoon sunlight shines on his breast

as red as love, true love, that cannot be hidden but reveals itself to the beloved with a song!

The Labyrinth at Norwich Cathedral

In Norwich Cathedral, the cloisters surround the courtyard, where the green grass is cropped short and

the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee is memorialized with flat, gray stones in the shape of a maze:

O Labyrinth! I recognize you again, and enter in, pondering as I walk through each twist and turn,

forgetting the Minotaur, focusing on redemption, the pagan past turned into the Christian present,

as I whisper my prayers into an invisible realm, asking over and over again, “What is your will for my life, O God?”

Ely Cathedral at Sunset

As the train sped west from Norwich at sunset, we passed by Ely Cathedral: I could see it, across the harbor

of the River Great Ouse, where sailing boats were moored: light shone around it, as it stood steadfast on a hill.

I glimpsed it, and then it was gone, as the train continued down the train-track toward Cambridge.

A Concussion in Cambridge

I had the misfortune to hit my head, hard, while I was in Cambridge: it happened late at night, or early in the morning, when I bent down in the dark to get something out of my rucksack, and instead experienced the exquisitely painful sensation that occurs when you knock your skull against a bedpost. Foolish, I thought, being so tired, and I laid down to sleep, thinking I would be better in the morning. But I was not. I was dizzy. So I stayed in bed, as it rained outside, and I rested.

I watched a documentary film, as I slipped in and out of wakefulness, about C.S. Lewis, called The Most Reluctant Convert. It was about conversations between men, and I missed Joy bringing light into the Shadowlands. In the evening, when I was feeling better, I got up from bed to look out of the window, streaked with rainwater, at the houses across the street. They looked beautiful, being made of dark brown stone, wet with rain and gleaming now as the westering sun swept over them and turned them to shining gold.

Part II: Flashback to Scenes in Cambridge, Ely, and London

After Walking in the Cambridge Botanical Garden

After walking in the Cambridge Botanical Garden, I went to the top of the FitzWilliam Museum where the “True to Nature” exhibit of plein-air painting was on display: and I was thinking about how extraordinary it is to be surrounded by trees and flowers, and mountains and fountains, by succulents and sea-waves, turning green in the light as they froth on the shore, by open roads and snowy fields, by cumulus clouds and giant lily pads, by volcanoes and grottos, by rocky terrain that leads down to duck-ponds, by memories of the desert or the Italian peninsula, because English gardeners and nineteenth-century European painters decided, more than a hundred years ago, to make a canvas of the earth.

Bohdan at the Alienarum

In England, I was much closer to the war in Ukraine: I met a Ukrainian refugee in Kensington Gardens, in London, at the Alienarum 5 exhibit in the Serpentine Galleries, where the artist asked the question: “What if aliens were in love with us? What would change?”

The Ukrainian man and I put on our virtual reality headsets, plunging into outer-space together, and without realizing it, we met as atoms of color, cool blue and rainbow-bright, and touched without touching in the vast reaches of someone else’s science-fiction.

And afterwards, the techs told us what had happened to us in the interactive virtual space, where we were nothing more than atoms – than photons – passing by the stars and nebulas and galaxies, in a universe that is and is not, that was and will be

in imitatio Creatoris. So we talked afterwards, since we had connected, and it turned out that he had a Ukrainian friend in Los Angeles, where I work, who needed a place to stay, and I happened to know someone coordinating resources for Ukrainian refugees, so we put our friends in touch with one another

and hoped for the best for them. The man wanted to know why I wanted to help, so I told him about my sister, Asya, who came to California from Ukraine when she was a teenager, and lived with my family, so she could go to school and sing – she was an opera singer –

and how she died in a car accident when she was twenty years old ... So Ukraine is in my heart because of my sister, and I have been praying,

constantly, for the war to end, because the sight of the young people in Ukraine suffering and dying, reminds me of how Asya died,

and the memory is terrible. But maybe, someday soon, the war will end.

Punting

A punt is a flat-bottomed boat that you can take out on the water of the River Cam that runs between the Colleges of Cambridge University, and Ella the Punter does that: she drives the boat with a long pole, down the river, and I was in her boat one day.

Sitting across from me were three generations of Americans—a grandma, a mother, and six-month-old baby Eva—and their friend, a student at Cambridge, whom they had come to visit. As we bumped along down the river, we all admired the splendid architecture of the college buildings and the way the flowers and trees, grass and ivy

adorn the water’s edge, but I more admired the baby, who insisted on being breastfed even though her mother was a little bit busy, and I liked that about the baby, who refused to be pacified with anything other than her mother’s love.

St. Ethelreda

In Ely, I stood in front of the white statue of St. Ethelreda, who never wanted to be married or have children, but rather wanted to live chaste and dedicated her virginity to God, which she did, even though her father forced her to marry twice. She somehow escaped the duties of marriage, even when wed, and Marie de France wrote about this in her twelfth-century Vie de Saint Audree, a long poem I have read more than once and remember clearly, because it makes me reflect like white cumulus clouds do on the face of blue water.

The Round Pond in Kensington Gardens

I wish you could have seen the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens that morning with me: so still and beautiful, and so full of the moving pictures of white cumulus clouds as the statue of Queen Victoria overlooked it from a distance.

The Mute Swans and Canada Geese were all princes and princesses in sleepy glory, slowly awakening as the sun rose higher in the sky, and I was amazed and pondering many things in my heart, in my heart, in my heart.

St. Matthew’s Guesthouse, Westminster, London

There is a garden at St. Matthew’s Guesthouse, and a door from the second floor that opens to a spiral staircase

that leads down it, but I could not get there, because the door was locked and barricaded. I looked down

at all the pretty flowers from the window, and felt like I was looking into my own heart, as an outsider,

who cannot get in to a desirable place. Yet the next day, from the first floor, there was another door

and I entered the garden easily enough, and I turned and saw something I could not see from the window above:

Christ Crucified on a White Cross, and his mother, Mary, looking up into the eyes of her beloved Son.

Isaac the Painter

1 – two lovers

Isaac is a painter from another country, who paints watercolors, acrylics and oils in a tunnel by the footpath that runs along the River Thames between the Globe Theatre and Westminster Bridge, and I met him.

His paintings are very beautiful, full of gorgeous colors, like blue and red and white, and powerful images, like the one of two lovers in the rain, under an enormous umbrella, not far from the spike of the Big Ben Clocktower.

He said he could sell me any picture that I wanted, for a discount, except for that one – and I knew that what he said was true.

2 – butterfly

I showed Isaac some of my own art, because I had my cell phone with me, so I could connect to my website and bring up digital photographs of my work, including the pencil drawing I did of my own hands, laid over a pregnant belly, and a butterfly emerging from them, copied three different times, and each time, an orange wash that I laid over the picture grew big, bigger, and biggest— and I told Isaac I made this one after a miscarriage. I did not say it was my own. I did not say I called the pencil-and-paint artwork, God of Hope.

3 – prophecy

I told Isaac he was a special person with a special gift for the world, and he told me the same. When I came home to California, I read the verse in Genesis that says: I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.

Philip the Engineer

“Keep calm and carry on” ~ A British Saying

On the train from London to Cambridge, I met Philip, an engineer. He told me his firm had worked out the designs for an upgrade for a major corporate building in Kyiv, and they had just been approved when

a bomb flattened the building and broke it down to nothing but rubble. So now the remodel is out, and rebuilding is not yet possible. (When will the war in Ukraine end, O Lord?)

I told Philip about the Ukrainian man I met in London, and his friend in Los Angeles, and how I wanted to help her, and Philip replied, “You have to do it, don’t you?” Then he told me about a Ukrainian refugee working for his firm, and even though

they can’t get her officially on the payroll because she hasn’t got her work permit yet, they’re paying her until she does. And I told Philip about my sister Asya, and I started crying, thinking of all these very young people in the Ukrainian diaspora, seeking refuge

from the violence in our dark world. Tears did not come to Philip’s eyes, even though he was compassionate, maybe because he was a man, or maybe because the British have a clear and present memory of how they fought to defend their country in the world wars

and have no intention

of surrendering to tyranny.

Part III: Continuing an Epic Adventure in Chester

Lost and Found

When I arrived in Chester, I first got lost, as I always seem to need to do. I was bewildered between

the train station and my rented room in Shaz’s AirBnB. It was so close, and I knew it, but still

it took time for me to follow the map: a gift unrecognized at the time. Though I once was lost, I now

am found. I opened the blinds of my bedroom window. Then I could see the Cathedral.

The Shrine of St. Werburgh

“Ora et labora,” ~ Rule of St. Benedict

The Cathedral was once a Benedictine Abbey, where monks sang their Psalms everyday

and made manuscripts from vellum, stitched together and bound between boards, with pages first written upon with Latin words

in calligraphic scripts, then decorated with historiated initials and flowering borders, illuminated with gold and silver, as the monks meditated

on Latin grammars and gospel-books, Psalters and sermon collections, books of hours and bestiaries and commentaries, saints’ lives and

miracle-stories, cartularies and world-maps, chronicles and Christian thoughts from St. Augustine of Hippo and Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede

and the Glossa ordinaria, classical literature by Ovid and Virgil, Caesar and Cicero, Horace and Livy, and Lucretius and Pliny,

both the Younger and the Elder, thus proving the wisdom of Solomon: of the making of books, there is no end.

But they would pause

from their work, and rise and go out of the scriptoria, from the writing desks carved out of stone on the second floor beside the windows, where

the light shown through, and they would go down to the sanctuary, to the Shrine that honors St. Werburgh, the princess who became the fourth Abbess of Ely,

and they would bow down on their knees to pray, remembering how once, long ago, the geese were destroying the virgin’s growing corn,

so she had them confined to a certain house, as if they were domestic, not wild, and in the morning, when she was ready to command them to be gone,

she found that a servant had eaten one of them, so she said, “Bring to me the bones and the feathers of the bird that has died,” and when

it was done, the bride of the Most High God prayed that the dead bird should be made whole, and should live, and it came alive again! Then all

of the distressed geese were cheering and crying out at the return of their lost companion, when the virgin-saint told them they must

depart, and never return, and so they left, taking flight into a blue sky decorated with cumulus clouds.

The monks imagined their prayers took flight just so from the Shrine of St. Werburgh to Heaven:

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name,

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven ...

The Creation Window of Chester Cathedral

The Artist made the world, and Rosalind Grimshaw made the Creation Window, in imitatio Creatoris, so that each of the Six Days is illuminated with light:

He made Light! So she cast the colors of her glass to show an angel with a yellow face and white wings, a brilliant star, and the Aurora Borealis, and an Eagle, representing the Spirit of God.

He made the waters and the firmament that separates them! So she imagined the Blue Marble of the World that we can see from outer space and a shuttle spacecraft that rises above to look below.

He made the dry land, and the seed-bearing plants, and the trees! So she crafted red apples, a pomegranate, and half of a red-and-yellow bell-pepper, a purple fig, bursting open, and grasses, bullrushes, peas, wheat, and herbs,

and a butterfly on an orchid-flower in a glass beaker, suggesting the new science of genetic engineering, and the strange promise of what mankind’s future may hold one day ...

He made the sun, and the moon, and the stars! So she designed a universe of planets in glass, red Mars and green Earth and purple Jupiter, a gray Saturn with a ring around it, and the Sun, and then

to the macrocosm she matched the microcosm, the picture of her own brain-scan, showing how it looks when someone has Parkinson’s Disease, her disease, which took her life, but not before she finished her Creation.

He made men and women and gave them dominion! So she brought the Morning Star, Jesus the Christ, into the stained-glass window, and the image of a cow and a calf from an aboriginal painting – man’s earliest

artistic effort remembered – where she placed her own handprint on the cow’s shoulder, then made an African Adam and Eve, a spiral horned deer, and a Banyankoli cow, and the ultrasound image of an unborn child, her own grandchild: hope for the next generation.

The Promise

There is a garden in the heart of the cathedral, and a fountain in the center of the garden.

In the midst of the fountain, there is a promise, where the Samaritan woman looks tenderly into the eyes of Jesus,

her face above his face, her hands gifting to him the bowl of water to answer the question of his thirst, his yearning

for her stronger than Jacob’s for Rachel at the well. Beneath their bodies, sculpted in bronze,

I read the silent words etched in stone that were his words to her:

Jesus said, “the water that I give will be an inner spring always welling up for eternal Life.”

Part IV: Under Enchantment in North Wales

Following Sir Gawain

Tracking the footsteps of another pilgrim, who sought to fulfill his vow, even unto death, I find myself passing through a valley of cold, green shadow, where the peaks of the mountains, enshrouded with cloud, loom like giants, and mystery and magic is all around me in the mist: the Green Chapel is not far from here, but I do not yet hear the sound of a man sharpening his axe.

Snowdonia

From far away, I glimpse the peak of the tallest mountain in the range: Snowdonia! Innocent white sheep feed in the green fields of your domain, and streams of water flow swiftly over the rocks in your lands, tumbling down in frothing falls. They make my heart rejoice!

The littlest lamb, by his mother, is safely chewing the grass between your river and the flowering purple foxgloves: it takes two years for the plant to fully bloom, and here their summer glory is displayed for me before they pass into eternity.

Castle Conwy

I walked along the medieval walls around the town where Castle Conwy overlooks the River, admiring the eight turrets of the fortress from different angles, and the seagulls nesting in the crevices, and the green ivy growing on the gray stones.

Roman Aquaduct

The Romans built this water-way a long time ago, when they ruled this country, before they were driven out or were called back, and now little, narrow gondolas traverse it, high above a valley, with passengers in awe of all they see from the height. I am in awe, too, though I only walk to the middle of the Aquaduct, and not across, because there are four horses running free in the field below and their freedom captures my attention: two are mares, and two are foals, and together they are a picture of the future.

Part V: Returning from Leeds to London with the Elixir

Kirkstall Abbey

Here in the ruins, I see shadows on the grass, and I hear the echoes of the past in stories from a woman’s waterfall of words, spoken in a sanctuary open to the sky, beside stones blackened by industry, but mysteriously, golden underneath

like a parable that promises a seed will grow day and night, from the dark earth, until the time is right for the harvest of bright corn: can this church be rebuilt and restored? Can the stones that were torn down be resurrected? Like a valley of dry bones, like a bird from nothing more than its feathers and fragile phalanges, can this place come back to life? O, that the wind

would come whistling through, over and under and all around, so that I could be caught up like a prophet chasing a chariot of fire, looking to heaven for the Light as the Power of the Presence of the Almighty raised my life above the abbey tower to behold a vision of the future in the present moment!

White cumulus clouds in a blue sky: giant angels dancing before the endless Throne.

Jane and Jonathan Meet Up in Leeds

I had not seen my friend Jonathan from Israel in three years because the pandemic made it impossible from me to travel from America to the United Kingdom for our annual conference where we learn so much and talk so long.

But there was a shift in the world, and a window opened (if not a door), and I climbed through it like a child and met him, surprised and delighted, as we happened to cross paths between two buildings at the university: it was not a coincidence; it was a divine appointment.

So we had

dinner at the Indian place in the park, and I told him all about my hardships and losses during the past two years. Then we went to listen to medieval Spanish music, sung in the dark, which was beautiful. And after that,

we went out of the concert hall, and we found a place to sit, and he told me about his hardships, and I listened to him, as he had listened to me, because listening is how people show one another their friendship— that, and in our case, poems about hydrangeas.

Three years ago, I wrote a poem for Jonathan about blue hydrangeas, which grow in acidic soil, but this year, when I was with him, I saw hydrangeas that were pink, because the soil in which they sank their roots was not harsh – and that makes all the difference in the world.

Returning to King’s Cross Station

I arrived in London from Leeds, like Harry Potter with Hedwig, not far from Platform Nine and Three Quarters, and soon emerged from King’s Cross Station where I looked up at a tall, brick Clocktower, and I realized: it was Time.

The Elixir

Always trust in God, not your own understanding, and serve him while you are young, and old, because the Pilgrimage will go swiftly by and you will find yourself at the end, beginning again.