Leslie Leyland Fields

Leslie Leyland Fields is an Alaskan writer who has published twelve books, including Your Story Matters (2020, NavPress), Crossing the Waters (2016), and the poetry collection The Water Under Fish (1994). She has taught at the University of Alaska, and is a founding faculty member of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program. She also founded the Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, an annual writing retreat on her family’s wilderness island in Alaska.

She and the poet Paul J. Willis have just had a new collection of Advent readings published by IVP: A Radiant Birth: Advent Readings for a Bright Season. It consists of 42 readings from the first Sunday of Advent through to Epiphany written by members of the Chrysostrom Society. Some of these readings are poems, while others are stories and essays, and they come from such highly regarded writers as Luci Shaw, Robert Siegel, Diane Glancy, Eugene Peterson, and Madeleine L’Engle ― all of whom are (or were) members of the Chrysostrom Society.

The following poem is from Leslie Leyland Fields, and appears in A Radiant Birth.

Let the Stable Still Astonish

Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: "Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
be born here, in this place?”
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
Of our hearts and says, "Yes,
Let the God
of Heaven and Earth
be born here―
In this place."

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Walter Wangerin Jr.*

Walter Wangerin Jr. (1944―2021) is the author of more than 40 books, and served as a Lutheran pastor, and as a professor at Evansville University and later at Valparaiso University ― both in Indiana. His novel Book of the Dun Cow (1978) rocketed him into the spotlight, enabling him to write a wide variety of books across his career.

He has participated as a member of the Chrysostom Society, which includes (or included at various points) such fine writers as Madeleine L’Engle, Luci Shaw, Robert Siegel, John Leax, Doris Betts, Paul Willis, Jeanne Murray Walker, Eugene Peterson and Philip Yancey.

Yancey said in an August 9th memorial piece for Christianity Today, “As both a sermonizer and an artist, with graduate degrees in theology and English, Walt lived with the constant tension of how best to express themes of grace and the Cross. As a pastor, he found that story conveys truth most effectively and profoundly.”

Walter Wangerin Jr. lived with cancer for more than fifteen years, before dying on August 5th 2021. The following poem is from his collection On an Age-Old Anvil (Cascade Books, 2018).

Sacred

The wild geese lace the sky
flying north,
flying to the arctic
to lay and brood
the egg of creation.

The ancient Irishman
laying windrows with his scythe
looks up with a blue, rheumy eye.
He drops the cutting blade
and raises reverential hands.

Once it was a Dove,
the Holy Ghost descending.
Now it is the wild goose
flying.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Walter Wangerin Jr.: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Patrick's Rune

Patrick’s Rune was written by an unidentified author, in the ancient Bearla Feine Irish dialect, as part of a longer piece called “St. Patrick’s Hymn Before Tarah” in the Liber Hymnorum ― a manuscript from the 11th Century (or earlier) ― which is preserved in the Trinity College Library in Dublin. It was also known as "The Faedh Fiada" or "The Cry of the Deer."

When Madeleine L’Engle was beginning to work on A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) ― her third novel in the series that began with A Wrinkle In Time (1962) ― a friend who was visiting Iona in Scotland sent her a card which included Patrick’s Rune. L’Engle soon realized that she could organize all the plot details, she had already sketched out, around this poem. It became central to the novel’s organizational structure.

Perhaps because of how skilfully she wove the poem into the text of her story, many who post this fragment on the internet attribute the poem to her. It was, however, translated by J.C. Mangan.

Some early sources even attribute the poem to Patrick of Ireland, himself ― saying he composed it “on Easter Saturday, A.D. 433, on his way from Slane to the royal palace of Leogaire, at Tara, with seven clerical companions and the youthful St. Benignus, to shield himself and them against the wiles and plots of the druids and assassins appointed to compass his destruction.” More likely, it was written to commemorate this event, and may have been skilfully woven into a larger text.

Patrick’s Rune

At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

George MacDonald*

George MacDonald (1824—1905) is the author of more than fifty books in a wide variety of genres — novels, plays, sermons, poems, essays and fairy tales. He became a Congregational minister in Arundel, Scotland in 1850, but left that position three years later due to theological differences. He never took on another church — although he was offered a staggering $20,000 per year by a large New York City church in 1872, when he was in the United States on a lecture tour.

There are some who dispute some of MacDonald’s less-orthodox beliefs. He did eventually join the Anglican Church, but was not drawn to its high liturgy or theology. MacDonald himself did not want to spend energy disputing. In one novel he wrote:

-----“The farmer believed in God—that is, he tried to do
-----what God required of him, and thus was on the straight
-----road to know him. He talked little about religion, and
-----was not one to take sides on doctrinal issues. When he
-----heard people advocating or opposing the claims of this
-----or that party in the church, he would turn away with a
-----smile such as men yield to the talk of children. He had
-----no time, he would say, for that kind of thing. He had enough
-----to do in trying to faithfully practice what was beyond dispute.”

Numerous authors have declared George MacDonald’s influence on their work, including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, and Madeleine L'Engle.

The Grace of Grace

Had I the grace to win the grace
Of some old man in lore complete,
My face would worship at his face,
And I sit lowly at his feet.

Had I the grace to win the grace
Of childhood, loving shy, apart,
The child should find a nearer place,
And teach me resting on my heart.

Had I the grace to win the grace
Of maiden living all above,
My soul would trample down the base,
That she might have a man to love.

A grace I had no grace to win
Knocks now at my half open door:
Ah, Lord of glory, come thou in!—
Thy grace divine is all, and more.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about George MacDonald: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Madeleine L'Engle*

Madeleine L'Engle (1918—2007) was born and raised in New York City, although during her teen years she lived in the Swiss Alps and in Charleston, South Carolina. She met her husband, Hugh Franklin, when she was living in Greenwich Village and working in theatre. They were married in 1946, and he died in 1986. She was librarian at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York for more than thirty years.

She is best known for her Newbery Medal winning novel A Wrinkle in Time (1963) and its sequels. In her poems, L'Engle primarily uses traditional structures. Her highly-quotable Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art was first published in 1980. Her new and collected poems, The Ordering of Love (Shaw), appeared in 2005.

The following poem appeared in the Christmas collection Winter Song (1996) — which is a collaboration between Madeleine L'Engle and Luci Shaw.

Into the Darkest Hour

It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss —
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.

It was a time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight —
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Madeleine L'Engle: first post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Luci Shaw*

Luci Shaw is one of the most significant Christian poets of our time. She takes on topics of significance to people of faith, yet refuses to undermine her art with preconceived, didactic ways of thinking, or sentimentality. One important topic for Shaw is the incarnation.

Since childhood, Luci Shaw has annually written Christmas poems; originally the practice was simply for inclusion with her Christmas correspondence. As her poetic skills grew, so did the quality and quantity of these poems. In 1996, she and her friend Madeleine L’Engle released the book Wintersong — a joint collection of Christmas readings. Ten years later Eerdmans published Accompanied By Angels, a book of Shaw’s incarnation poems, many of which had appeared in her earlier books.

Since then, this tradition continues to result in fine Christmas poetry. In 2004 Luci Shaw sent me an early version of the following poem — followed by a revised version in 2005. The poem was further revised (as reproduced below) for inclusion in her 2006 collection What The Light Was Like (Wordfarm). Knowing how she continually returns to fine-tune her work, I would not be surprised to find she has since revised it further.

Breath

When in the cavern darkness, the child
first opened his mouth (even before
his eyes widened to see the supple world
his lungs had breathed into being),
could he have known that breathing
trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs
as it brushes in and out through flesh
to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating,
tramping the crossroads of the brain
like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and
invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes
and toenails? Did he have any idea it
would take all his breath to speak in stories
that would change the world?

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Luci Shaw: first post; third post; fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Madeleine L’Engle

Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) is best known for her novels for teens — particularly for A Wrinkle in Time and it’s sequels. Although these books may most logically be classified as science-fiction, they really have more in common with fantasy novels; they seem less concerned with the technical side (although they certainly cover that) than with the human and spiritual story. In 1963 A Wrinkle in Time won the prestigious Newbery Award. Her novel A Ring of Endless Light (the title comes from a Henry Vaughan poem) was selected as a Newbery Honor Book for 1980. My favourite L’Engle fiction is the Wrinkle sequel Many Waters (1986), which takes twentieth century twins back to the time of the flood. The depth of these books is not limited by the youth of her protagonists.

In Walking on Water, her book of reflections on faith and art, she put the role of all writers and artists in perspective when she writes: “the artist is truly the servant of the work”.

In her poetry Madeleine L’Engle primarily uses traditional rhyming and rhythmic structures. She often writes on spiritual themes — sometimes taking on the persona of a biblical character — and about her relationship with her husband, Hugh Franklin who died in 1986.

She co-authored three books with her good friend, the poet Luci Shaw; their Advent and Christmas poetry and reflections were gathered in the 1996 book Wintersong, which I return to every year. Her new and collected poems — The Ordering of Love — was published in 2005. The following poem reflects her interest in both science and faith.

Sonnet, Trinity 18

Peace is the center of the Atom, the core
Of quiet within the storm. It is not
A cessation, a nothingness; more
The lightning in reverse is what
Reveals the light. It is the law that binds
The atom’s structure, ordering the dance
Of proton and electron, and that finds
Within the midst of flame and wind, the glance
In the still eye of the vast hurricane.
Peace is not placidity; peace is
The power to endure the megatron of pain
With joy, the silent thunder of release,
The ordering of Love. Peace is the atom’s start,
The primal image: God within the heart.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Madeleine L'Engle: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca