‘Your father’s gone,’ my bald headmaster said. So began a poem by Edward Lucie-Smith. The words were spoken to a boy of ten. The poem goes on to make plain the shattering impact of the conversation. It is more shattering than we can at first imagine. It had implications for the bullying he was enduring. None the less it is the kind of thing that sometimes has to be said and few there are who can relish it. Indeed, it could be said that we need those in society who can do that, who can help to make life endurable, who can suit the words to the occasion and give us a language to help us in our troubles.
Troubles? They come our way, sometimes not single spies but in battalions. Big troubles like bereavements take the wind out of our sails. Smaller troubles wear us down. Sometimes it helps to use the word ‘troubles’ as we have done in Northern Ireland to avoid anything more specific. Perhaps it is like the ancient world calling the Black Sea the Euxine, the Pleasant or Hospitable Sea, as though by re-labelling it, they could change its nature. We do something like this when we refer to tuberculosis as TB or when we reduce motor neurone disease to the initials MND. We spare ourselves unnecessary pain.
Shakespeare eased the way for us. He helped us to recognise a common phenomenon that comes our way all too often. Whether or not we take arms against it, we probably know very well what it is to be facing a sea of troubles. Shakespeare was rather good at finding words to pin down human experience. It is an uncommon facility and we find ourselves quoting him often without realising that we are doing so. This is where poetry comes into its own. It speaks a language near to our very being. It gives us the vocabulary we need in a time of stress – or a time of jubilation.
And where Shakespeare does well, the Psalms excel. What could be more apt than the first verse of Psalm 46.’God is our refuge and strength, a very present help n trouble.’ Words like that are not manufactured, like words in an instruction manual; they come from deep down, beyond the complete command of the writer. ’Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.’ we find in Job. And if we find prolonged echoes of his comforters rather more than we can stomach, to find that nugget is to realise that the writer knew a thing or two, despite the long-winded efforts at consolatory discourse from the lips of Eliphaz. Whatever our religious or non-religious inclination, we know that in the Psalms, as in Shakespeare, we are in at the deep end.
STREET IN BOURNEMOUTH
Bournemouth has two piers and two universities. It also has two loyalties. It used to be in Hampshire; it is now in Dorset. It has an imposing church, St Peter’s, in the middle of Bournemouth. Designed by Street. Its history has involved a roll-call of some of the greats in church architecture and church crafts – Burne-Jones, Bodley and Comper. A development project now in hand includes the overhaul of the Harrison organ, an indication of the part played by music in the church programme.
Until the 1930s Bournemouth had trams. These were replaced by trolley-buses in the 1960s, by which time the piers no longer had paddle-steamers coming and going.
SPA TOWN
Pauline Key ministers in Holy Trinity, Matlock Bath. The church supports Tim and Kate Lees working in the Philippines with Interserve.
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