Simeon's song, Eliot's poem and all our laments

I don’t know how I haven’t come across TS Eliot’s Ariel poem “A Song for Simeon” before. He wrote it and several others (including “Journey of the Magi” as ‘Christmas cards’ towards the end of the 1920s. I won’t reproduce it here, because it’s still in copyright, but you can find it online at http://bit.ly/eliot-and-simeon. It’s a reflection on the Nunc Dimittis, portraying Simeon as a tired old man waiting for his own death. It begins innocently enough on a window sill:

Norwich Cathedral

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and 
the winter sun creeps by the snow hill

 but quickly turns to the dominant theme of the poem, death as a fading:

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Over the past six months, as Jill’s father has grown progressively weaker (and lighter), we’ve watched on as he too has begun to fade, and have prayed with Eliot’s Simeon:

Grant us thy peace.

Simeon goes on to talk about his faithful discipleship as an observant Jew, lamenting that the memory of his house will fade in the desolations that are to come, the ‘time of sorrow’ when

They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.

This too has marked 2017 for us, with its endless flow of refugees fleeing war, persecution, economic disaster. For them too, we have prayed:

Inverness Cathedral

Grant us thy peace.

Simeon’s musing turns next to the passion of Christ, the ‘time of cords and scourges and lamentation’, of Mary’s sorrow, and imagines Christmas as ‘this birth season of decease’. Over many years of preaching at Christmas, I’ve only been able to make proper sense when I’ve coupled it with Calvary. This year, I’ve carried a Christmas refrain around in my head:

This day is a day like any other;
Yet unique, the hinge of history.

Those are not Eliot’s words, but mine. The ‘day like any other’ is an allusion to the fact that December 25th doesn’t obliterate or mask pain, suffering and despair, though it often exacerbates it with its superficial air of jollity. And yet, I know somewhere deep down that because of this ‘birth season of decease’, I find hope in Christ’s coming, and pray it with longing for our tragic world:

Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow…

St Aignan's Church, Brinay

As the poem draws to its natural end, Simeon’s ordinariness come to the fore. He is not a giant of the faith, though he experiences both the glory of the coming Christ and the derision accorded by the world to the people of the Word, the children of God. Nor is he a mystic or a martyr like John of the Cross or Teresa of Ávila:

Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought
and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.

He is every person, everyman, you and me, who walk in faith, struggle with faith, often finding little to gladden our hearts:

I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those
after me.

But Simeon, like us, at the end, can pray ‘Let thy servant depart’ because he has truly ‘seen thy salvation.’ May you in 2018 find a little faith, a little hope, a little prayer in your heart, and may God grant you too his peace.

Barnabas, the Apostle of Cyprus

Monastery Church of St Barnabas

There was a Levite, a native of Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement’). [Acts 4.36]

The disagreement became so sharp that they parted company; Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. [Acts 15.39]

Iconostasis

Barnabas, cousin of John Mark, is remembered widely on Cyprus as their apostle, the one who brought them the good news of Jesus Christ. While we were on holiday, we were able to go to the Monastery of St Barnabas, which had three monks in residence as late as 1976.

Thomas doubts no more

The story goes that Barnabas, having returned to his home city of Salamis, was martyred there by some in the Jewish community. His body was dumped in the marshes and recovered by Christians. They buried him on the site where the monastery remains as a museum.

The tomb of the saint

In 477 Archbishop Anthemios had a remarkable dream which enabled him to find the remains of the saint with his handwritten Gospel of St Matthew in his arms. As a result, Cyprus became an autocephalous or self-governing Orthodox church, the fifth in the world.

The monastery church is now an icon museum, somewhat spoilt by being more like an art gallery than a church. The icons themselves are not particularly remarkable.

Barnabas remembered by followers of Jesus

What we found specially moving was the tomb of the saint, now in the crypt of an 18th century building somewhat apart from the museum and much less overrun by tourists. Underground is a simple tomb covered in a drape, and tapers burning in Barnabas' memory. He is after all the one who told Cyprus about Jesus!

The pictures show both the large monastery church with its icon displays, and the tomb church.