Faith
April 26, 2011 at 2:28pm
This is a poem by Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy, an Anglican priest and WWI poet. His humility and honesty are striking, and his description of faith is one of the most plausible and persuasive I have ever read.
Faith
HOW do I know that God is good? I don’t. I gamble like a man. I bet my life Upon one side in life’s great war. I must, I can’t stand out. I must take sides. The man who is a man a neutral in this fight is not a man. He’s bulk and body without breath, cold leg of lamb without mint sauce. A fool. He makes me sick. Good Lord! Weak tea! Cold slops! I want to live, live out, not wobble through my life somehow, and then into the dark. I must have God. This life’s too dull without, Too dull for aught but suicide. What’s man To live for else? I’d murder some one just To see red blood. I’d drink myself blind drunk, and see blue snakes if I could not look up to see blue skies, and hear God speaking through the silence of the stars. How is it proved? It isn’t proved, you fool; it can’t be proved. How can you prove a victory before It’s won? How can you prove a man who leads, To be a leader worth the following, Unless you follow to the death–and out Beyond mere death, which is not anything but Satan’s lie upon eternal life? Well–God’s my leader, and I hold that He Is good, and strong enough to work His plan and purpose out to its appointed end. I am no fool, I have my reasons for This faith, but they are not the reasonings, The coldly calculated formulae of thought divorced from feeling. They are true, Too true for that. There’s no such thing as thought Which does not feel, if it be real thought and not thought’s ghost–all pale and sicklied o’er with dead conventions–abstract truth–man’s lie upon this living, loving, suff’ring Truth, that pleads and pulses in my very veins, the blue blood of all beauty, and the breath of life itself. I see what God has done, what life in this world is. I see what you See, this eternal struggle in the dark. I see the foul disorders, and the filth Of mind and soul, in which men, wallowing like swine, stamp on their brothers till they drown in puddles of stale blood, and vomitings of their corruption. This life stinks in places, ‘Tis true, yet scent of roses and of hay new mown comes stealing on the evening breeze, and through the market’s din, the bargaining of cheats, who make God’s world a den of thieves, I hear sweet bells ring out to gayer, and see the faithful kneeling by the Calvary Of Christ. I walk in crowded streets where men and women, mad with lust, loose-lipped and lewd, go promenading down to hell’s wide gates; Yet have I looked into my mother’s eyes, And seen the light that never was on sea or land, the light of Love, pure Love and true, And on that Love I bet my life. I back my mother ‘gainst a whore when I believe In God, and can a man do less or more? I have to choose. I back the scent of life against its stink. That’s what Faith works out at finally. I know not why the Evil, I know not why the Good, both mysteries remain unsolved and both insoluble. I know that both are there, the battle set, And I must fight on this side or on that. I can’t stand shiv’ring on the bank, I plunge head first. I bet my life on Beauty, Truth, And Love, not abstract but incarnate Truth, Not Beauty’s passing shadow but its Self. Its very self made flesh Love, realised. I bet my life on Christ–Christ Crucified. Behold your God! My soul cries out. He hangs, serenely patient in His agony, and turns the soul of darkness into light. I look upon that body, writhing, pierced and torn with nails, and see the battlefields of time, the mangled dead, the gaping wounds, the sweating, dazed survivors straggling back, The widows worn and haggard, still dry-eyed, because their weight of sorrow will not lift and let them weep; I see the ravished maid, the honest mother in her shame; I see all history pass by, and through it all still shines that face, the Christ face, like a star which pierces drifting clouds, and tells the Truth. They pass, but it remains and shines untouched, a pledge of that great hour which surely comes when storm winds sob to silence, fury spent to silver silence, and the moon sails calm and stately through the soundless seas of Peace. So through the clouds of Calvary–there shines His face, and I believe that Evil dies, And Good lives on, loves on, and conquers all– All War must end in Peace. These clouds are lies. They cannot last. The blue sky is the Truth. For God` is Love. Such is my Faith, and such My reasons for it, and I find them strong Enough. And you? You want to argue? Well, I can’t. It is a choice. I choose the Christ.