Thought for the Week: Be patterns
Ian Kirk-Smith reflects on inspirational words and figures
Poets are not absolutely necessary to the efficient operation of society. Trains will run on time without them. But poets can provide insights into the human condition. They can find images and symbols appropriate to our predicament. They can articulate the defining narratives of our age and our culture. They can create possibilities out of ambiguity, conflict and confusion. They can suggest a humane vision of how we can deal with each other. They can remind us of what is best in ourselves.
Poets operate best when they explore personal territory – when they dig into it with honesty and conviction. As WB Yeats said: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’. They reinforce, by doing this, the importance of the individual and of lived experience. These issues are also at the very heart of our faith and of what it means to be a Quaker today.
A poet does not have to have a moral centre. Some fine ones, in different artistic disciplines, have enhanced their reputation by demonstrating the excesses of a life lived without one. It is not a precondition to any kind of greatness. Posterity, fortunately, tends to judge the creation rather than the creator.
In 1995 Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was given the world’s most important literary prize, by the Nobel committee, for ‘works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.’ He had a moral centre.
Ireland, and the world, have lost a major poet. They have also lost a profoundly eloquent moral voice. It was a voice that proved it is possible to ‘speak truth to power’ in a tender way. The poetry of Seamus Heaney will endure in his books – as with his heroes such as Sophocles, Wordsworth and Kavanagh. His voice, sadly, is now silent. He cannot speak out, with quiet authority, on subjects of concern.
Seamus Heaney reminded us, in beautifully crafted and memorable words and phrases, that people inhabit a culture first and an economy second. It is a concern that has resonated, rightly, with Friends in the past few years and today. He would have been comfortable standing in front of St Paul’s cathedral at the Occupy protest, and silently alongside Quakers there on a Sunday morning, in sympathy with them. Earlier this year, referring to Ireland, he said: ‘We are not simply a credit rating or an economy but a history and a culture, a human population rather than a statistical phenomenon.’
In his poetry Seamus Heaney cherished the commonplace and everyday life. His words validated the authenticity of individual experience and, implicitly, the importance of every person. He reinforced this, every day, in the way he treated people. Despite the pressures of being a public figure, and an internationally renown poet, he afforded everyone the same respect, generosity and courtesy, whether they were a president of the United States or a plumber. It did not matter to Seamus.
As Quakers, we take inspiration from the words of the Bible. We also take inspiration from figures in history. Sometimes, as with Plato or Confucius, it is in their words. Sometime it is also, with figures such as saint Francis of Assisi and Ghandi, in their lives.
Being a Quaker is, at heart, not really about what we believe but, fundamentally, about the way in which we live our lives. In remembering a truly great man, the words of George Fox in 1656 seem very appropriate:
Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.
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