Toen Stephen Smyth, secretaris-generaal van de Schotse Raad van Kerken (Acts) onlangs op bezoek was in Nederland, heeft hij niet alleen de bezoekers van de kerk van het Leger des Heils in Almere toegesproken. Hij voerde ook enkele persoonlijke gesprekken over het werk in Schotland en hij maakte een excursie naar het voormalige eiland Schokland om iets van oud-Nederland te proeven. Daar vertelde hij van zijn liefde voor gedichten en toen hij hoorde dat het eiland in 1859 noodgedwongen door de bewoners was verlaten, omdat de dijken het eiland niet meer konden beschermen, vertelde hij van een gedicht dat hij zelf over ‘dijken’ had geschreven. ‘Maar het is wel kritisch op een bepaalde manier’, zei hij erbij, ‘dat zullen Nederlanders waarschijnlijk niet begrijpen’. ‘Stuur maar op’, kreeg hij te horen. En dat deed hij. Hieronder het gedicht ‘Manning the Dykes’. En om nog iets meer van de dichtkunst van Stephen Smyth te ervaren nog een tweetal gedichten: ‘Tents, not temples’ en: ‘Give us a God with skin’.
Manning the Dykes
We have gotten very good at dykes:
planning and building, draining and drying,
mending, extending;
reclaiming laundered land from salted silt;
squaring off our human will
against a much more complex creation.
We have gotten very good at dykes.
But, for too long now,
trapped by our own achievements,
we have had to contract our overburdened workers
ever longer,
had to stretch our under-nourished populace
ever thinner.
For, out there, in our days,
the world has changed:
its systems storming
towards an unfamiliar balance.
The tide has turned
and all our petty fabrications
are less than castles made in sand.
There is no point now
in plugging our heroic fingers
against the flood.
Our future
is in fishing, not farming;
in fluid, not firm.
What we need now
is to teach
our faithful, but exhausted, community
to learn afresh
how to swim and sail.
Stephen Eric Smyth
Tents, not Temples
We keep on building temples
where we should be pitching tents.
We keep on constructing ownership
on rock and sky, and clinging
to This spot, This space,
This hill, This tower….
none of which is sure enough
to last the sands of time.
We keep on falling at the feet of idols
made in our own image
and born of our own projections:
little matter
be they built from gold or power
or stone upon hewn stone.
Yet beyond our fabrications stands a god,
a god who speaks our name. Listen
to the freeing in our hearts.
Wherever we are called tomorrow
is it likely to be within our self-confining walls
or settled on some present land of little promise?
This god, this Other,
tugs at our tentflaps
and, rustling off through dry or meagre pastures,
invites us onwards.
Sometimes, this god, this real God,
will lead the way;
sometimes, we will walk alongside
this Him or Her;
and, sometimes, we must take our turn
to carry this God, this needy God,
upon our weary backs.
Oh, there are many days,
and even more nights, when
the shifting sand beneath our steps
best understates our faith-filled journeying.
Yet, with every glimpse of new horizon,
we do have the sense
that we are
getting somewhere.
Stephen Eric Smyth
Give us a God with skin
not the forgotten god of empty ritual,
nor some vague kind of inferred presence.
We don’t want that indifferent greybeard
nor the frigid bookkeeper nor capricious wonder worker.
We don’t want a human choice from a pantheon
of our own fears and foibles, our hopes and heroics.
Do not try to palm us off with a warm fuzzy
nor to confuse us with some clever theological construct.
We need a God with skin:
a God who is embodied and earthy;
who is washed down lovingly in our birth
and anointed equally lovingly in our death;
a God who hungers and knows our bodily needs;
a God who can laugh and dance,
who has played and who knows the importance of rest;
a God who can be cared for, who can be touched.
We need a God who sweats and blisters
from work and from walking,
who smells of the crowd and of the marketplace;
a God who is leathered with exposure
and tempered with tears;
a God enfleshed,
who will shiver with all our fears,
and will bruise and bleed under lash and thorn.
We need a God who knows our dust
yet whose presence glows with the fullness of life.
We need this God beside us, within us;
to sustain and unite us.
We need this God to assure us
that we are not alone
and that, yes, our fleeting mortal day
is meant, and is meaningful.
Stephen Eric Smyth
© Stephen Eric Smyth sesmythfms@talktalk.net used with permission