Thought for the week: Soul clap its hands and sing
‘Giving time to the tattered garments of our bodies, giving them rest and peace, can open the door to joy.’
I love WB Yeats’ poem about spiritual life in old age, from which my title is taken. David, my husband, and I, are having our noses stuck into old age – he is almost blind, which for a life-long painter in oils is a great deprivation; and I take five minutes to remember why I came downstairs, and can never remember the names of people I know well until after they have gone. Another great learning curve, finding how to move through a day as an old person, without self-pity, and with a flood of understanding for my parents and for all who were old before us.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick – unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
(From ‘Sailing to Byzantium’)
When I look back on my early years in a Quaker Meeting, nearly sixty years ago now, and think forward through different Meetings, there were always a few serene and compassionate elders to hold up our troubled hearts and make the worship tell.
How wonderful if our losses in the physical realm could only serve to show more strongly the inner being becoming increasingly transparent to the glorious liberty of the Children of God – so that the pain and dislocation of death itself could open out into joy and peace for ourselves and those around us.
It does take considerable energy, though, to clap your hands and sing – unless this is your normal state. Effort does not help, it hinders. The trouble is, the singing comes from the state one is in, not the state from the singing! Joy seems like a gift, not like something that can be earned by strenuous struggle. Yet giving time to the tattered garments of our bodies and minds, giving them rest and peace, can open the door to joy.
A Quaker Meeting has always been a good setting for this. But David and I haven’t been able to get there very often, for several years now.
George Fox also has phrase, which really speaks to me, about how to open the door to joy – he says: ‘Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God… from whence life comes’.
Sometimes I sit up in bed and allow these words to resonate in me and, all of a sudden, the door opens, there is a great sense of calm and relaxation, and the colours of sky and roof outside our window are beauty and meaning, ‘from whence life comes’.
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