You know Spring is upon us when magpies begin to dive bomb. Today was my first of the season, along a route that I often ride, without previous incident. Despite being at a distinct disadvantage - the attacks are always from behind - it is possible to discern that something sinister is afoot. There are fleeting shadows and the fluster of wings. Occasionally the tell-take snap of a beak.

I don't blame the bird, of course. The nesting instinct is strong and I must look like an odd and potentially dangerous stranger in its midst. Ah, if only birds could measure the good intentions, but even they cannot read minds!

It's funny. After having completed a diploma in counselling and even run my own counselling business, albeit 10 years ago, I still fall into some very basic thinking errors. You have probably seen the lists or diagrams of cognitive distortions at some stage. They tend to be sorted into ten or twelve categories, depending upon the therapist or training, and each has its own particular way of hooking you in. They become habitual and like a drug, especially addictive. But they are poor ways of thinking and responding in life and cause no end of trouble.

For me it is doubly troubling. because thinking errors undermine faith and subsequent actions without one being aware of them. The counsellor in me should have been far more alert to the fact that without constant revision, lifelong patterns of thinking will return. It was only when I was reading a devotional by the late Rev. Selwyn Hughes, himself a trained counsellor. that I realised that the tools that I applied in secular circumstances equally applied in the realm of faith. Of course.

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then to pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far that you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti

Written at the age of 19, this beautiful sonnet is perhaps Rossetti's best known poem. Thematically, it doesn't require deep investigation, remembrance for love lost in death. The poet wants to be remembered by her suitor ("Only remember me") but then again, feels it might be better if he forgets, if only to save him the sense of enduring sadness that comes with memory.

But it is not only this melancholic subject that appeals to me. The young Rossetti was so accomplished in her use of structure. She keeps to the rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet but lines often as not run onto the next line - in a sense - undermining that structure, to great effect.

She has a turn of phrase too, a simple economy of language, that renders me mute.

'Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay'

Just splendid!

The Great War may seem like generations ago, something awful that is well in the past, but remembered annually on the 11th November. But its repercussions are with us to this day. Moreover, it is a clear watershed moment in modern history, one that utterly changed what had gone before.

The carnage and scale has already been well-documented - the industrial slaughter of soldiers, the reorganisation of whole economies and populations for the 'war effort', the trialling of new technologies, no matter how immoral.

But World War 1 was the catalyst for everything that has followed - World War 2, the reigniting of ethnic conflicts, the atomic bomb, the search for more and more lethal means to kill. In as much as people argue that humanity is becoming more morally fair and sensitive, and there is evidence for that on a personal level, the relations between nations have not. At best there is a veneer of civility, one which could be abandoned to murderous conflict at any moment.

Do I sound overly pessimistic? I have been a life-long student of history and I find little to shake this view. Of course I hope and I pray for peace - the latter is especially powerful - but I fear that things will only get worse before they ever get better. And only God can make them so.

St Finbar's Father Joe has just returned from visiting family in Germany. Part of his sermon today reflected on his journey to Dachau concentration camp, of the sheer awfulness of what happened there. Nevertheless, he noted how God's love and sacrifice shone through, even in such a place. 

It may be hard to understand a thing like love in the midst of evil - the actions of the Nazis call for revenge and swift justice in most people's eyes - but a longer view might reveal a Divine hand at work. Not that God in any way was an agent in such events, but that we might derive some peace and comfort for taking  a longer view and wondering how it looks in the broader scheme of things. How might sheer wickedness have some kind of redemptive quality?

This reminded me of my own pilgrimage to Dachau over forty years ago. Like the Father I was shocked and horrified by what I encountered but I can't recall, except for anger, what I thought of God's purposes in such a hell. It was winter, very cold and I well remember simmering on the train back to Munich. But modern Germans, of course, know only too well about their recent past and are certainly contrite. Dachau is a warning about unrestrained or misdirected human nature - a salutary warning about negative human capacity.

The Dachau Camp was relatively benign when compared to places like Auschwitz or Buchenwald, where slaughter was on a mass scale. 41,000 people died here - bad enough - sure, but far less than at the other killing grounds. May such a thing never happen again. Only constant reminders will keep it in our race memory.

Because I am about to start training for admission to another church, I have been hunting around for proof of my baptism. I came late to that event, being 21 at the time. The venue was the church I had begun going to, St Albans, Frenchs Forest, and the minister, the kindly Rev. Len Straw. But I was unable to find the correct certificate and the thought of combing boxes of old documents filled me with a kind of dread.

So I asked the same church if they could email me proof of some kind and they duly did, though they spelt the venerable Straw's name incorrectly. Never mind I thought. I have what I need.

Today I was fiddling around in my garage library (there is no room in the house, sob!) when a small book fell from the shelf. From that small book, my baptism certificate fell also.

The Rev. Straw, name correctly rendered now, can rest in peace.

I sent a text message to my ex this morning that read, " Tom sick. RAT negative. PCR to come." Reflecting on it as I walked to and from the shops a little later, it struck me that such a message would have made no sense only a few years ago. The Coronavirus has changed my vocabulary and added some new acronyms, not necessarily for the better.

It may be that it is in the nature of texting (to use a noun as a verb), that truncations occur. After all, early text messaging was a gabble of thumbs to get the words onto the tiny screen. Little wonder that U became You and R became Are. I don't use them, boring sod that I am. Old habits die hard, especially for English teachers.

But I did read the other day that the kinds of words that have emerged from messaging, abbreviations and acronyms and so forth, should be embraced as valuable contributions to our evolving language. Well, I think that is what I read, because I think that, with the exception of a few examples, it is a thoroughly bad idea. They are fine, if annoying, in their current context. But if people began using them as part of an ordinary conversation, then I feel that my eyes may glaze over.

There are some things worth defending.

Australia changed Federal Governments a few months ago and the workings of the old one are just beginning to unravel. It is not a pretty sight, for in as much as being in government is a complicated and difficult task, incompetence will out. Always.

Only a few days ago, it was revealed that the former PM, Scott Morrison, had secretly had himself sworn in to half a dozen other ministries, including Home Affairs, Treasury and Health, that already had serving ministers. It is an extraordinary revelation that has the Opposition in pirouettes, some condemning the former PM, others keeping a low profile. You can imagine how you might feel if you were the minister in charge of a portfolio, only to find much later that your PM had secretly usurped your authority.

I am not that surprised at Morrison's behaviour. He came across as a one-man-band during Covid, omnipresent before the cameras and demanding attention be paid. He had an impossibly inflated opinion of his own ability, impossible by the standards of any human being, one that seems, sadly, to have inevitably fallen short. I don't doubt his sincerity in the midst of a crisis, but five ministries and the Prime Ministership is beyond anyone.

 Christina Rosetti is best remembered as a devotional or religious poet, something that would ordinarily condemn her to a minor status. It is entirely unfair, of course, since Hopkins could have a blazing career in the same genre of writing. Being a man in the 19th Century made his far more likely, for women struggled to be heard or taken seriously.

Rosetti's brother, Dante Gabriel Rosetti (yes, the very same who gained fame as a poet and artist in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) thought her verse the best since Elizabeth Barret Browning. He meant women's verse, of course. In any event, she is highly regarded today and underwent a kind of renaissance late last century.

I have a volume of her poetry on my kindle and have been reading a few poems very night. It's true that if you are not of a religious persuasion. then you might find her subject matter a stumbling block. For me, it is all joy. 

from Uphill

Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the very end,

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

from The One Certainty 

Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,

All things are vanity. The eye and ear

Cannot be filled with what they see and hear,

Like early dew or like the sudden breath

Of wind, or like the grass that withereth,

Is man tossed to and fro by hope and fear,

So little joy hath he, so little cheer....

I seems odd to me that I am forgetting more and more, that things that should be better retained within short-term memory are not. I have two shifts at 2RPH. The one on Tuesday starts at 3pm and the one on Saturday starts at 1pm. I have been doing these new shifts for about three months now.

Yesterday I left at about 10am to drive to Penrith, there to catch whatever train took my fancy. I was thinking, of course, that I was starting work at 1pm. The penny didn't drop until much later, when, coming into Star City station on the light rail, I looked at my watch and realised I had an extra two hours on my hands. I promptly alighted and, shaking my head, went back in the other direction.

It is sobering thing to come to grips with. The aging of the body is one thing, but the aging of the brain is a lot sadder. You can have a laugh about it, of course, but there is likely only one direction  possible in this kind of scenario. Fortunately, I still have my faith.

Prayer is a funny thing. It can seem so perfunctory at times - this is something that should be avoided - but because we are creatures given overly to feelings, it is not unusual to find ourselves experiencing what the medievals called spiritual dryness. We cannot live on feelings alone and they is usually a very poor judge of reality. Just because we don't feel something doesn't mean our circumstances are any different to when we did feel something.

Prayer is about persistence and about listening. We tend to do a lot of the talking. Imagine a conversation that is entirely one-way, which, of course, is not a conversation at all. Not very fair is it?

Prayer is also one of those things, one of those important things, that can be answered quite emphatically. I won't go into my own recent case of answered prayer. It was not a coincidence and not a fluke, but genuinely amazing. I am still tingling from it. God doesn't always answer our prayers in such a way. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be earnest and believing when we ask. There will be an answer, one way or or another.

The Morning Bird is a bird I hear every day at first light, but I do not know yet which bird it is. When I look outside it is till too dark to discern any kind of small thing aloft and soon enough the magpies and cockatoos add to the chorus and the search is fruitless.

Still on the theme of birds in poetry, Larkin wrote the following piece, Coming, a recollection about childhood. But of course, there is a bird.

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden,

It's fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,

It will be spring soon-

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter

And starts to be happy.

The poem says far more about the poet's somewhat gloomy outlook than the voice of the thrush, however much the latter is 'astonishing the brickwork.' That the spring is coming soon seems more a forlorn hope for change than anything truly joyful. Well, such is Mr Larkin.

Morning Bird

When the sun is almost up-
You are, already, emphatic bird-

Your tweets on some kind of

exclamatory repeat:

You have my attention!

Though not for me-

You sing for the startling morn,

Less a feat of strength

More one of prayer,

For deep hours borne

And the conjuring of light,

For possum and foxes lair,

The sly tripping wind and

Eternal flightless night.

Riding between the villages of Hazelbrook and Woodford this morning, I was afforded a magnificent view to the north. Wooded hills and mountains lay like a smooth carpet, the dark greens of the gums almost silver in the winter sun. Australian trees do not lose their leaves in autumn - the dry climate would make their replenishment untenable - though we have enough introduced exotics to throw some colour into the mix.

There was also apparent a calamity of bird sound; anything that could get up a tweet was in full song, doubtless rejoicing in the splendid morn. And thus Shelley's Skylark came to mind, and the bird that inspired the hymn of praise that is To A Skylark. 

'What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plains?'

Shelley was writing in the first two decades of the 19th Century. More than half a century later, Thomas Hardy would pen a tribute to Shelley by way of eulogising (the now long dead) skylark in Shelley's Skylark.

'The dust of the skylark Shelley heard

And made immortal through times to be;

Though it only lived like another bird.

And knew not its immortality.'

Birds often feature in poetry and seem to be somewhat of an inspiration. The poet whose poetry got me hooked as a 16 year old was John Keats. Ode To A Nightingale was one of the first things I knew by heart, as gloomy an encomium as one is likely to read, for Keats is very preoccupied with thoughts of death. The bird song is almost an intrusion into his introspection. And yet it is a beautiful poem, teetering on fracturing and conflicting emotions.

'Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;'

I love that allusion, echoing, as it does, over millennia.

I wonder what appeals to thinking teens nowadays?

 A little over twenty years ago a small group of us, all from a local choir, decided to meet together to sing songs in the Taize tradition. These are simple, yet powerful songs - often very short and therefore repeated - in a variety of languages. Their purpose is to create unity and spiritual uplifting amongst whoever is assembled. They are often aimed to benefit Christian youth across the spectrum of denominations.

Our little group was quite secular but we liked singing. The meditative quality of each piece nevertheless spoke to a deeper spiritual yearning, one that I think resides in everyone. The group petered out eventually - I think the householder moved on - but these songs kept popping up at regular choir meetings. The Christian content was apt to bother some people, so Latin was an excellent mask for these folks.

Lately I've been thinking about Taize again. There are taize-style services in Sydney and even one in the Blue Mountains. So I think I will check it out. And if you'd like to know more about Taize than the pittance I have described, here is a link to the very well-spring:

https://www.taize.fr/en