SPORADIC rain. It has made the horses shine. But a
sweet, mild morning with racing skies. Walking in this direction,
the youthful John Constable, looking around, declared: "The sky is
the keynote." He meant for the land.
Blue tits are rifling the seed-heads. But the white
cat trembles - the hunt is coming through. She feels it afar off.
No sound yet, but very soon the cries and yells. No comfort the
lap, the study, the familiar talk. She takes to the cupboard-top,
and prays to the cat gods. Then the commotion below.
Walking to collect the post, my boots clog with
leaves. October is on the way out - in lovely retreat, its golds
and reds blending, its warmth unlike any other warmth.
Different golds and reds in the Blue Mountains -
burning colours that travel fast. How benign they were when I
walked in them, their distant Sydney suburbs, how enviable. And now
they are in flames. I add this disaster to the lesser ones in my
petitionary prayers at matins.
But I recognise the remoteness, the natural distance
from the congregation's ability to feel any true alarm. A minor
crash in Colchester High Street would fright us more. Yet who can
say what the bowed head is saying? Maybe a little local bad news
will be giving way to some secret joy?
Trinitytide begins to draw to a close with Luke the
polymath - Dr Luke, who could do anything: heal you, write like an
angel, travel everywhere. I preach on Luke's zest. We're none of us
as young as we were, and we need to hear this lively apostle. The
Church's year may be petering out, but his Acts of the Apostles
gets us on the road. Interestingly, he addressed it not to the
Church at large, but to a single reader, Theophilus, whom he calls
"your Excellency". This often makes me think of George Herbert
placing his poems in the hands of Nicholas Ferrar.
Luke is not a storyteller in the biblical sense, but
an author. We are told that he was a Gentile convert to
Christianity who both spoke and wrote Greek. Not grand Greek, but
marketplace Greek. It was Luke who accompanied Paul on his second
and third journeys - including the memorable one via Antioch, where
the words of Christ were first heard in Europe.
Luke was unmarried, and, some think, once on another
road altogether - that to Emmaus. And here he is once more in the
Stour valley during his little summer. His biography is both full
of facts and open to the imagination. Thus we have both a
non-mythic and a non-legendary Luke; thus his collect: "Almighty
God, who calledst Luke the physician, whose praise is in the
Gospel, to be an evangelist, and physician of the soul, may it
please thee, that by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine
delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed."
"Only Luke is with me," Paul would say. Only Luke!
They said that his teachings contained more about prayer than any
other subject. They are certainly more to our way of thinking than
much of the New Testament. It is his having been so polymathic and
such a good walker. Supposing they found one of his paintings in
the catacombs - imagine! But we have found two of his books, thanks
to the excellent Theophilus. He ran his Church with the help of
women. He said that Christ was for the world, not just the
Jews.
Ronald Blythe's latest collection,
Under a Broad Sky, is published by Canterbury Press at £14.99 (CT
Bookshop £13.49); 978-84825-474-9.