The Falcon & the Falconer: Going to Presbytery

One doesn’t feel like poetry or prose after the Presbytery meeting and yet ….

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” (William Blake)

I think of two years ago, good wine, circling eagles and mighty Lions.
but find It hard to write of journeys now. And yet out of a ditch
in startling fashion an egret flew straight across the road barely missing our car, while from the same ditch, at the same time, a hank rose straight into the air.

Companions unintended by their creator; disaster almost came as they flew their separate ways. -
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

They stood there at the microphone owning their thoughts but more; the mighty words of God. Simply reading scripture. Hoping for the power of His word. It fell away.

The falcon cannot hear the Falconer.

He stood there the gay elder in the straight black coat. Pleading his cause: the older woman who lives in fornication for the sake of money. Her gifts are wasted he said- she needs our gift of ordination.

The falcon cannot hear the Falconer.

80 proud they stood; the Word was emptied before them.[1]
We filled a paper with our protest-they rushed away-
“Surely some revelation is at hand” but it is not the Falconer’s.
Surely the lie of something new-but it is an old lie:

They “turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” (Jude 1:4b)

The falcon cannot hear the Falconer.

The poet saw a lion- it was a monstrosity, “[It] Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” It rose to fill a crib of Bethlehem. It rose to destroy.

But, no matter, the Lion of Charles Williams, the Lion of all Christendom, the Lion of Judah still reigns.

"By the side of the road, … there appeared the creature they had set out to seek. It was larger and mightier than when they had seen it before--and, comparatively close as they now were, they fell back appalled by the mere effluence of strength that issued from it. It was moving like a walled city, like the siege-towers raised against Nineveh or Jerusalem; each terrible paw, as it set it down, sank into the firm ground as if into mud, but was plucked forth without effort; the movements of its mane, whenever it mightily turned its head, sent reverberations of energy through the air, which was shaken into the wind by that tossed hair.” The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams

“Stop weeping; behold the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome.” Rev. 5:5

[1] 10 A 80 for/ 76 against
Belhar 78 to 79 defeated
nFOG 70 to 85 defeated.