Huddled

Boats and ships of all kinds can be powerful metaphors and symbols. The three word slogan “Stop the boats” on the previous UK Prime Minister's podium was about much more than simply stopping the flimsy dingies being used to transport undocumented migrants across the English Channel at great expense financially and in terms of lives lost. The "little boats" of Dunkirk evoke all kinds of emotions with those familiar with that story from the early days of World War Two (even if their role has been somewhat exaggerated). The story of the Armada is another where the facts play second fiddle to the patriotic legend. Stories of the coffin ships of the Irish famine era and the slave ships that crossed the same stretch of water in the centuries before are all redolent with meaning. Whilst during the recent pandemic some said we were all in the same boat, only to be told, we were in many many different boats, of different sizes and degrees of seaworthiness, but we were all in the same storm.

Last Sunday whilst reading the poem Malcolm Guite had chosen for that day in his Lent Devotional "The Word in the Wilderness", "Late Ripeness" by Czeslaw Milosz I read the lines:

"One after another my former lives were departing,   

like ships, together with their sorrow."

It brought to mind that last metaphor, but in reverse... I saw "my former lives" or rather, different aspects of myself, not departing like different ships, but all on board a barely seaworthy dingy. 

And then, this week whilst at St. Paul's-Outside-the-Walls in Rome I saw the smaller, pictured version of Timothy Schmalz's "Angels Unawares" installed in St. Peter's Square. This, in many ways, is the conceptual opposite of the simplistic "Stop the Boats" slogan. But the clever juxtaposition of bearded eastern European Jew beside a Niqab wearing woman, among passengers of all cultures, epitomising the "huddled masses" welcomed in Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus" inscribed on the pedestal of The Statue of Liberty, but not warmly endorsed by the current US regime, or their fellow travellers around the world. 

We hope to share some interesting news about this sculpture, in relation to Belfast in the fulness of time, but, without taking away from the original intent of this piece, its encapsulation of radical diversity on the one boat also spoke into my thinking about myself (somewhat narcissistically) that had started the previous Sunday, resulting ultimately in the following poem. 

We are all a complex combination of different elements, some that are better known than others. It's not for nothing that I often say at funerals that we are all mourning slightly different people, and the whole person is known, perhaps not even to themselves, but only to God.

Multiple passengers huddled

Into one small, leaky lifeboat,

Riding lower and lower through

The ever changing weather.

The performer, saved from the stage,

And selling himself to survive.

The preacher, preaching to himself

in the sparsely occupied pews.

The son, left an orphaned adult,

with a lifetime of lacunae.

The husband and father, aware

Of frequent faults and wasted time.

The activist, left impotent;

A leader without followers.

The democrat, disillusioned

By what the voting booth reveals.

The chair, flattered by accolades,

Deflated by wasted minutes.

The lawyer, loathing legalists

And Dunning-Kruger exemplars.

The calm head in difficult times,

Incarnation of Kipling's “If.”

The go-to, can-do, first contact,

Fearing no-one will take his call.

The loudest laugh and first to speak,

Feeling lonely amidst a crowd.

The worrier, fretting over

Pence, agendas and timetables.

The lifelong student burrowing

Into repeated rabbit holes.

The poet, too proud and busy

To be taught, exposed in print.

Selah