Empathy (Days 5-8)

A Prayer The Body Makes Entirely

This is the second set of eleven posts I’m doing every four days during Lent as a sort of online devotional. These posts include poems, passages, songs, film clips, stories, and more for you to spend time with each day. They’re meant to help you think about being creative, observant, empathetic, and/or still. I will offer all of them with very little or no context.

Days 1-4

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February 27 (Day 5)

I cannot watch this without being deeply moved. It speaks to something in my blood and bones.

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February 28 (Day 6)

SAINT KEVIN AND THE BLACKBIRD

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
his cell, but the cell is narrow, so

one turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
as a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
into the network of eternal life,

is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

from the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

a prayer his body makes entirely
for he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
and on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

SEAMUS HEANEY

*you can watch Heaney read the poem—and talk about it—here.

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March 1 (Day 7)

The Story of Greyfriars Bobby

A constable for the Edinburgh City Police, John Gray, Constable No 90 for the Edinburgh City Police had a Skye Terrier named “Bobby” (slang for police officers in Britain). They were night watchmen together and they patrolled the damp, cold streets of the beautiful old city together. Eventually this led to Mr. Gray becoming ill with tuberculosis. Legend has it that Bobby never left his side while he was dying.

When Gray was buried in the Greyfriars Kirkyard in the Old Town of Edinburgh, Bobby reportedly spent fourteen years mourning his master’s death. The day after Gray’s funeral, Bobby was found lying on the fresh mound of earth. Since dogs were not allowed in the burial grounds, he was driven out. But the next morning he was found there again, having somehow made his way into the fenced graveyard. The curator of the cemetery took pity on the dog and allowed him to stay. He stayed at Gray’s grave until his own death, in 1872.

People in and around Greyfriars Kirk took care of him. Every day at one o’clock the Coffee House restaurant nearby put out a bowl of dinner for him. Each week members of the Royal Engineers brought him a steak treat. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh bought him a collar and paid for his license so he wouldn’t be considered a stray.

Upon Bobby’s death—14 years after his master’s death—Greyfriars Bobby was buried just inside the gate of Greyfriars Kirkyard, not far from John Gray’s grave. A year later, a baroness had a Greyfriars Bobby statue and fountain erected in his honor near the cemetery entrance. Today, people visit the statue to touch Bobby’s nose, then go to his grave to leave a stick for him. This is a pilgrimage I’ve made every time I’ve been to Edinburgh and a story that I reference with Seamus’s desire to stay with his old man after he finds him dead in my novel, Lark Ascending.

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Day 8 (March 2)

What Punishments of God Are Not Gifts?