Choruses
from "The Rock"
I
The
Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
О perpetual revolution of configured stars,
О perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
О
world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of
stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the
Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But
nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in
information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,
Where the River flows, with foreign
flotations.
There I was told: we have too many churches,
And too few chop-houses. There I was told:
Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the
Church
In
the place where they work, but where they spend their
Sundays.
In the City, we need no bells:
Let them waken the suburbs.
I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was
told:
We toil for six days, on the seventh we must
motor
To Hindhead, or Maidenhead.
If the weather is foul we stay at home and
read the papers.
In industrial districts, there I was told
Of economic laws.
In the pleasant countryside, there it seemed
That the country now is only fit for picnics.
And the Church does not seem to be wanted
In country or in suburbs; and in the town
Only for important weddings.
THE ROCK: The lot of man is ceaseless labour,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I
know
That it is hard to be really useful,
resigning
The things that men count for happiness,
seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity,
accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I
say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not
change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not
change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and
churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find
explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The
desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The
desert is not only around the corner,
The
desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you.
The
desert is in the heart of your brother.
The
good man is the builder, if he build what is good.
I
will show you the things that are now being done,
And
some of the things that were long ago done,
That
you may take heart. Make perfect your will.
Let me show you the work of the humble.
Listen.
The lights fade; in the semi-darkness the
voices of Workmen are
heard chanting.
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
And clay for new brick
And
lime for new mortar
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.
Now
а group of Workmen is silhouetted against the dim sky. From
farther away, they are answered by voices of the Unemployed.
No man has hired us
With pocketed hands
And lowered faces
We stand about in open places
And shiver in unlit rooms.
Only the wind moves
Over empty fields, untilled
Where the plough rests, at an angle
To the furrow. In this land
There shall be one cigarette to two men,
To two women one half pint of bitter
Ale. In this land
No man has hired us.
Our life is unwelcome, our death
Unmentioned
in "The Times."
II
Thus your fathers were made
Fellow
citizens of the saints, of the household of God, being built
upon the
foundation
Of
apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.
But
you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a
ruined house?
Where
many are born to idleness, to frittered lives and squalid
deaths, embittered scorn in honey-hives,
And
those who would build and restore turn out the palms of
their hands,
or look in vain towards foreign lands for alms to
be more or the urn to be filled.
Your
building not fitly framed together, you sit ashamed and
wonder whether and how you may be builded
together for a
habitation of
God in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved on
the face of the waters like a lantern set on
the back of a
tortoise.
And some say: "How can we love our
neighbour? For love must
be made
real in act, as desire unites with desired; we have only
our labour
to give and our labour is not required.
We wait on corners, with nothing to bring but
the songs we can
sing which
nobody wants to hear sung;
Waiting to be flung in the end, on a heap
less useful than dung."
You, have you built well, have you forgotten
the cornerstone?
Talking
of right relations of men, but not of relations of men
to God.
"Our citizenship is in Heaven";
yes, but that is the model and
type for
your citizenship upon earth.
When
your fathers fixed the place of God,
And
settled all the inconvenient saints,
Apostles,
martyrs, in a kind of Whipsnade,
Then
they could set about imperial expansion
Accompanied
by industrial development.
Exporting
iron, coal and cotton goods
And intellectual
enlightenment
And
everything, including capital
And
several versions of the Word of God:
The
British race assured of a mission
Performed
it, but left much at home unsure.
Of
all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten
or ripe.
And
the Church must be forever building, and always decaying.
and always
being restored.
For
every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:
For
sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the Word of God.
For
pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.
And
of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.
For
good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands
alone on
the other side of death,
But
here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that
was done
by those who have gone before you.
And
all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble
repentance,
expiating the sins of your fathers;
And
all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as
devoted as
those of your fathers who fought to gain it.
The
Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying
within and
attacked from without;
For
this is the law of life; and you must remember that while
there is
time of prosperity
The
people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity
they will
decry it.
What life have you
if you have not life together?
There
is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in
praise of God.
Even
the anchorite who meditates alone,
For
whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God,
Prays
for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.
And
now you live dispersed on ribbon roads.
And
no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much
disturbance,
But
all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor
does the family even move about together.
But
every son would have his motor cycle,
And
daughters ride away on casual pillions.
Much
to cast down, much to build, much to restore;
Let
the work not delay, time and the arm not waste;
Let
the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone.
Let
the fire not be quenched in the forge.
VII
In
the beginning God created the world. Waste and void. Waste
and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And when there were men, in their various
ways, they struggled
in torment
towards God
Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing,
and man without
God
is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and
finding no
place of lodgement and germination.
They followed the light and the shadow, and
the light led them
forward to
light and the shadow led them to darkness,
Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping
devils rather than
nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness
on the face of
the deep.
And
the Spirit moved upon the face of the water.
And
men who turned towards the light and were known of the
light
Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher
Religions were
good
And led men from light to light, to knowledge
of Good and Evil.
But their light was ever surrounded and shot
with darkness
As the air of temperate seas is pierced by
the still dead breath of
the Arctic Current;
And they came to an end, a dead end stirred
with a flicker of life.
And they came to the withered ancient look of
a child that has
died of
starvation.
Prayer
wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirma-
tion of
rites with forgotten meanings
In the restless wind-whipped sand, or the
hills where the wind
will not
let the snow rest.
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness
on the face of
the deep.
Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time
and of
time,
A moment not out of time, but in time, in
what we call history:
transecting,
bisecting the world of time, a moment in time
but not like a moment of time,
A
moment in time but time was made through that moment:
for without the meaning there is no time, and
that moment
of time gave the meaning.
Then it seemed as if men must proceed from
light to light, in the
light of the Word,
Through
the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative
being;
Bestial as always before, carnal,
self-seeking as always before,
selfish and
purblind as ever before.
Yet
always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their
march on
the way that was lit by the light;
Often
halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet fol-
lowing no
other way.
But
it seems that something has happened that has never hap-
pened
before: though we know not just when, or why, or
how, or where.
Men
have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god;
and this
has never happened before
That
men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first
Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call
Life, or Race,
or Dialectic.
The
Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells up-
turned, what have we to do
But
stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In
an age which advances progressively backwards?
Voice of the Unemployed [afar
off]:
In
this land
There shall be one cigarette to two men,
To two women one half pint of bitter
Ale....
Chorus: What does the world say, does the whole world
stray in
high-powered cars on a by-pass way?
Voice of the Unemployed [more
faintly
in this land
No
man has hired us . . . .
Chorus: Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face
of the
deep.
Has
the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the
Church?
