So I went back to my college early before term started. And eventually, in desperation, went to see the college chaplain, who was, it happens, an American Episcopalian priest. So I told him this had happened to me and I didn’t know what to do with it.
He said, “Well, of course this happened to you; you’re in trouble. You recited these Psalms as though they were a background. But God is the prime mover and the ground of all being and the Word in whom and through whom all things are spoken and sustained into being. It’s not up to you to call him background. And you named his name in the poetry he himself has given us — you could hardly be surprised that he came.”
[…]
So I carried on like this and then later on a Roman Catholic friend of mine actually took me to hear a Franciscan friar preaching in Cambridge. … He was preaching, it was absolutely brilliant. He began talking about how a babe in the womb is entirely dependent upon its parent and hangs from the thread, as it were, of the umbilical cord and can do nothing. And even if the baby is born, it doesn’t actually physically have the strength even to turn itself over. All it can do is cry and hope to be heard and to be nurtured and nourished and fed. It’s utterly, utterly helpless.
And I thought, God, that’s exactly the way I am with this holy presence, you know, I’m hanging on a thread. Then he said, “You think I’m going to tell you that that’s how we all are with God, the transcendent creator. And in one way, it would be true if we regard him simply as the transcendent creator; we are utterly dependent. However, I’m here to tell you the exact opposite. I’m here to tell you that the utter helplessness of the babe, who can only cry and hope to be picked up and heard, is how God comes to us.”
… And he says, “This is what God does … and if you think he’s helpless, was helpless in The Womb of Mary and even more helpless, subjected to the dangers of the stable, lying in the straw, defenseless, certainly not going to strike us — think how completely vulnerable he is in this wafer. You know, there’s no arms or legs. You could take the wafer, the consecrated wafer, the presence of himself to you, and you could put it to the floor, you could spit on it and grind it under your foot. That’s the risk he takes to come to you.
Somehow in the midst of all of that, the penny dropped and I didn’t cease to think of God as completely holy, but I also thought of God as completely human. And … I realized for the first time in my life, I think, certainly my adult life, I felt it was okay to be a human being. Because in the days of my atheism, I was completely cowed by the scale of the universe. And there’s a lot of brutal atheist preaching which is using the cosmos as a big stick to beat you with into submission.
And suddenly, I thought, no, wait a minute, what if the maker of all this is in this and comes to me as a fellow human being? I then later realized, you know, takes the vulnerability to the nth degree and allows himself to be crucified in order to show what that love is, and then offers us resurrection.
He also reads his poem “Jesus falls the third time”:
He weeps with you and with you he will stay
When all your staying power has run out;
You can’t go on, you go on anyway.
He stumbles just beside you when the doubtThat always haunts you cuts you down at last
And takes away the hope that drove you on.
This is the third fall and it hurts the worst,
This long descent through darkness to depressionFrom which there seems no rising and no will
To rise, or breathe or bear your own heartbeat.
Twice you survived; this third time will surely kill,
And you could almost wish for that defeatExcept that in the cold hell where you freeze
You find your God beside you on his knees.
Very few people alive today, I think, understand the Christian faith — as informed by the Bible and by every moment of the life you live — in a more wonderful, beautiful, wholehearted, agedly wise and at the same time thoroughly childlike way than Malcolm Guite.
Also of note, on his writing of new Galahad and the Grail, which I cannot wait to read with the boys when they are old enough:
I was so cowed by the extraordinary achievements of the high modernists, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, David Jones, where the kind of thing they write is incredibly effective if you know what’s going on, but it’s bristling with footnotes and everything depends on getting an allusion to something that’s an allusion to something else. And I just suddenly got sick of it. I thought I don’t want to write this kind of coterie, university, elitist thing.
So I kind of thought I need to purge myself of that. But I still want all the subtleties and beauties of high English literature. So I began to be really interested in the poets and writers who can do all the brilliant things but don’t alienate their audience and reader in the course of it.