Advent Authors: Edwin Muir

This script was published before the live broadcast and may differ from the transmitted version due to editorial or timing alterations.

REV DR DONALD MACEWAN, UNIVERSITY CHAPLAIN

Good morning and thank you for joining us in St Andrews, a small town on the east coast of Scotland with a long history. I’m Donald MacEwan, the University Chaplain. A University has clung to this windswept corner of Fife for over 600 years, students and scholars reading, thinking, researching, teaching and writing. And we have gathered this morning in St Salvator’s Chapel, in the University, where worship has been offered since the 15th Century. The town is named for St Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint, a fisherman-disciple of Jesus, and today is St Andrew’s Day. But it is also the first Sunday of Advent, the season looking forward to the birth of Jesus, whose disciple Andrew was.

What better way of beginning Advent than in the ancient song of expectation, O Come, O come Emmanuel.

HYMN – O COME, O COME EMMANUEL (Tune: Veni Emmanuel)

DONALD

St Andrews may be a small town, but it has a global population of students and lecturers. I’ve been struck over recent days how many new international students here have asked me how people cope with the short dark winter days here. You get used to it, I say.

Advent makes much in the northern hemisphere of the metaphor of light in darkness. Later we’ll be joined by a Professor of Bible and Literature, the Reverend Alison Jack of Edinburgh University, who will explore the powerful work of Scottish writer, Edwin Muir, and how it can help us begin this Advent journey from darkness into light.

St Salvator’s Chapel Choir will now sing of God’s light scattering the darkness in this setting of A tender shoot by Kerensa Briggs. 

A TENDER SHOOT (Composer: Kerensa Briggs)

DONALD We are led in prayer now by Samantha Ferguson, Assistant Chaplain.

SAM
God of creation,
from your loving hand has come the beauty of nature,
the turning seasons,
the time of cold, winds from the north, short days and long nights.
We thank you for the coming of light:
your advent in our world, sharing our creaturely life,
your wisdom when we are confused,
your guidance when we are unsure of the right path.
We give thanks for the word made flesh,
and for all who have followed Christ
in faithfulness and frailty.
We remember Andrew’s enthusiasm and courage,
giving thanks for his faith
shared by many in Scotland and beyond,
especially those who wrestle with words
to express this faith afresh in our own time.

Merciful God,
as we enter this season of Advent,
we are conscious of the ways we choose darkness over light,
and fail in word and action to follow your Son.
Forgive us,
and help us find fresh ways to listen and to love,
through Christ our coming Lord,
Amen.

DONALD
Scots have long been drawn to the written word, and some of the most famous fictional characters have emerged from Scotland, from Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, to Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. The poems and songs of Robert Burns are celebrated and sung all round the world.

Edwin Muir was one writer who made his home right here in St Andrews. Born in Deerness, Orkney in 1887, Muir grew up both there and in Glasgow. He was to become one of Scotland’s most significant 20th Century poets. On marrying Willa Anderson in 1919, he and Willa moved from place to place across Europe and Britain, both writing, and working together on translations of Franz Kafka and other authors. Edwin’s first book of poetry came out in 1925, and ten years later he and Willa moved to St Andrews. 

Before Alison reflects on Muir’s work, a hymn now from Scotland written by John Bell and Graeme Maule exploring the Word of God in human voice.

HYMN – BEFORE THE WORLD BEGAN (Tune: Incarnation)

REV PROF ALISON JACK

As Donald has said, In the late 1930s, Edwin Muir and his wife Willa were living beside the North Sea in St Andrews, and to be honest they were finding the setting less than conducive to creative endeavour.

Millennia before this, the Gospel writer Matthew has Jesus at the beginning of his ministry withdrawing to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, to the village of Capernaum. Isaiah had imagined it would be here, in the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, that a light would dawn in the darkness. It’s here that Jesus finds his prophetic preaching voice. Matthew sets the scene in this reading from Chapter 4, which is read by Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University:

DAME SALLY

12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. 13 He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the lake, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, 14 so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

15 ‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— 16 the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’

17 From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’

ALISON

It is while Edwin Muir is in St Andrews, and his wife is unwell and in a nursing home, and the world is darkening on the eve of World War 2, that he senses something of this nearness of the kingdom of God. In his Autobiography Muir describes coming home from visiting his wife one dark evening, and seeing children playing marbles on the street. Perhaps this was a reminder to him of his own childhood, but he writes that ‘it seemed a simple little rehearsal for a resurrection promising a timeless renewal of life.’ Later that evening he finds himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer aloud with growing conviction and a sense that he was being ‘replenished’ and ‘astonished and delighted’ by the fullness of meaning he was discovering. In ‘joyful surprise’ he realises anew the ‘universal’ and inexhaustible’ riches of the prayer, which ‘sanctified human life’. He comes to the conclusion that ‘quite without knowing it, [he] was a Christian, no matter how bad a one.’

Muir goes on in the following months to return many times to the New Testament and the story of Jesus. He’s not drawn to any church or indeed to what he calls the ‘splendours of Christendom’ - these will be revealed to him when he travels to Italy many years later- but he has a deepening sense that Christ is, as he puts it, the ‘turning point of time and the meaning of life to everyone’. 

Muir is lit up by the realisation that the grace of God goes before him. There is an ‘alreadiness’ to his experience of God, the drawing near of the kingdom of heaven which Jesus had preached about beside another sea so far away.

The deep rootedness of religious myths and symbols in modern consciousness is something Muir returns to again and again in his poetry. In one of his most famous poems he stands ‘One foot in Eden still’, while looking across what he calls ‘the other land’ of current experience. Holding the two together, both the hope of a time of restoration and of an understanding of the ‘blossoms of grief and charity’ of actual life, brings ‘strange blessings’ never to be found in the Eden of the memory or longing. Jesus’ preaching reflects something of this ‘now and not yet’ quality in its understanding of the kingdom of heaven: seek the blessings of this liminality, of this threshold-space, he seems to say; hold fast to the glimmers of light in the darkness; trust in the one who is both of this world and beyond it.

But first, Jesus calls for action. ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’, he proclaims to all who will listen.

Repentance in religious contexts usually involves an admission of where one has gone wrong and a commitment to change one’s ways. But the word also, in the original Greek, implies a revolution in thinking, a volte-face, a moment of insight which changes everything. We might call Muir’s moment of clarity on a dark evening in St Andrews on the brink of war such a moment. In the next episode in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus calls Simon Peter and Andrew to act on a similar moment of startling reversal.

We’ll hear that part of the story after Charles Villiers Stanford’s setting of Psalm 150 – a call to praise God by offering the best of our human creativity.

PSALM 150 (CHANT) (Composer: Stanford)

O praise God in his holiness : praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him in his noble acts : praise him according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him in the sound of the trumpet : praise him upon the lute and harp.
Praise him in the cymbals and dances : praise him upon the strings and pipe.
Praise him upon the well-tuned cymbals : praise him upon the loud cymbals.
Let every thing that hath breath : praise the Lord.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end, Amen.

DAME SALLY

18 As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. 19 And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

ALISON

Who could have imagined that such a moment of life-changing decision beside the Sea of Galilee would lead, in legend at least, to the bones of one of those fishermen being shipwrecked on the faraway shores of Scotland; or, because of that legend, the rising up of a pilgrim destination which would eventually bear his name: St Andrews?

And it was here that Edwin Muir came to his moment of realisation of the ongoing significance of the presence of Jesus in his life and the life of the world. The moment sharpens his understanding of the human longing for a rewinding of time and the possibility of creation re-imagined, through the work of Christ. Muir expresses this longing very movingly in a much later poem about the Transfiguration, an episode in the life of Jesus which gives his disciples a glimpse of the glory of the resurrection. In the second stanza of the poem Muir reflects on the somewhat puzzling teaching of Jesus about his return, his Second Coming, which is one of the key themes of this season of Advent:

But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted, unsummoned …[Copyright material]

With a poet’s delicate touch Muir offers us a way to imagine a world in which all the actions we regret and the hurts we have caused, and the damage we have done to God’s good creation, might be reversed. Not forgotten or their effect unrecognised but somehow taken up into the loving understanding of God.

Muir does not speak the language of systematic theology or modern psychology or the science of climate change. But from a place of deep conviction and epiphany he offers us, in the language of poetry and metaphor, a glimpse of a possibility which speaks to Advent hope in all its allusive glory.

Edwin Muir was based in a village near Cambridge when he died and he is buried in the graveyard there in leafy Swaffham Prior. The epitaph on his grave reads: ‘his unblinded eyes Saw far and near the fields of Paradise’. On this St Andrews Day, the first Sunday in Advent, may we see through his eyes something of the promise of paradise, the very kingdom of heaven, both far and near.

CANTICLE OF ZACHARIAH (Composer: James MacMillan)
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel!
He has visited his people and redeemed them …

DONALD
That beautiful setting of a poem of hope from the opening chapter of Luke’s Gospel was composed by the Scot, Sir James MacMillan, whose music joins with words spoken by students in prayer. 

CECILIA
God of hope,
as we enter this season of longing for this world to be transformed,
we pray for places where so many people are experiencing darkness:
those suffering from violence and war
in the Middle East, Sudan, Ukraine and elsewhere;
people affected by changes in climate and the turning of the seasons;
all in our own communities struggling to see the way forward;
all affected by illness, loss and bereavement.
Come to us with your peace, we pray.

AGNUS DEI (Composer: James MacMillan)
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

THOMAS
Inspiring God,
we pray for all who work with words,
story-tellers, poets and novelists
who reflect on your love in our world with integrity and imagination:
in their creativity, may we find new insights, challenge and comfort.
Come to us with your beauty, we pray.

AGNUS DEI
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

SAM
Faithful God,
may all who follow your Son Jesus Christ,
encouraged by the example of St Andrew,
bring enthusiasm, joy and patience to our lives,
sharing our hope in your loving presence
throughout Advent and beyond.
Come to us in your love, we pray.

AGNUS DEI
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

SAM – LEADS CONGREGATION:
Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory
for ever and ever,
Amen.

DONALD
Our final song is a poem exploring the hope of Advent in metaphors from nature – soil beneath the frostline, diamond brilliance of stars through darkness, and the presence of Christ in the lonely, the stranger and the outcast. Now the heavens start to whisper. 

HYMN – NOW THE HEAVENS START TO WHISPER (Tune: Abbot’s Leigh)

DONALD
Go in the hope of God.
And the blessing of God almighty,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
be with you,
this Advent and ever more.

MUSIC: CHOIR, A CAPPELLA
Sung Amen

MUSIC: ORGAN
Organ Voluntary - Carillon-Sortie (Composer: Mulet)