This is a place I love to sit.
These planks play host to something new. The knots and lines and pools of gold…
We thought it strange, when it was built.
That knot looks like a screaming face.
The day he cut the oak tree down I knew that he must die.
“A god lives there, you fool!” I said. “He feeds upon the blood of men!”
The people shrank together, fearing him, and in familiar dread
of me, the tree, and Thor. I called great curses down on him,
but he picked up his axe and said that Christ would set us free.
By afternoon the tree was down, and all around the stump were piled
sweet-smelling grains of gold. “You will be dead tonight,” I said.
“Then I will be in heaven, with God!” he said, and laughed, as he and all
his friends sat down to eat and sing their song. We waited for
the storm – which did not come – and then I knew that Christ was strong.
But who would want to see their god? These words I could not understand.
You keep your greedy gaping god at bay – for this you kill.
(I did not know that Christ was kind.) Then through the morning sun I walked,
to speak to him. And as he, frowning, shaped the planks, I told him
of the ones I’d killed, of how they wept, and fought the ropes,
and showed him how I held the knife. I saw his hands were bruised and grazed
from working with the wood. And so I talked of the cold grip that
shrank my heart, and how my fingers stuck with blood.
Those lines are ripples, like the stream
in which I was baptised, in which my sins were washed away.
“All of them, Winfrith, all of them?” “Yes, every one.”
The people murmur their replies. He holds the bread for all to see.
I wonder, still, if it’s for me, but he says, “Yes, it is, it is…”
“You did not know,” is what he says, when pictures come from long ago.
“In Christ God has forgiven you. So you are new.”
The people press towards the front and each one takes a piece of bread.
He reads the words of God to us. One of his friends carved a wood cross,
a figure of the dying Lord. His eyes are closed. I looked at it
and knelt and cried – for all the grievous pain he had, and also for
the pain I made. “You are my opposite,” I said.
I sometimes heard their voices and I brought them there,
for him to take away.
These smooth and swirling parts are gold.
They told me that there is one God who lives in light, who made the world.
The thunder is just noise – instead, the voice of God is love.
We watched them build this church out of those planks, the even bones
of Thor’s defeat. And when the sun is pouring down, the little place
seems lit by gold. Then Winfrith talks of heaven and its glowing streets,
and of the crown that our Lord wears, because he conquered death.
(Death is a thing that I knew well – it had its kingdom in myself).
And now I know that I was wrong: there was no idol in the tree.
But Winfrith made it something new, which truly holds divinity –
because God lives in him, in all who are made new by faith –
in (please, dear Christ)
in even me.
(Winfrith, missionary to pagan Germany, is also known as Boniface.)
