First Refuge
Country of first asylum, or first refuge, is usually a neighbouring country to which a refugee flees. In the face of great challenge, even reported challenge, writing often becomes the place of first refuge for novelists and poets as they seek to make sense of the challenging experience. Rilke expresses it this way: Everything conspires to silence us, Partly with shame Partly with unspeakable hope. From the silence and refuge emerge art, music, poetry and enduring story. In community, these have the power to lead us from isolation to a place where we can wrestle with words and, in time, enlarge our perspectives on life and faith. At an obvious level, writing exposes injustice, as W.H Auden reminds us: Poetry makes nothing happen What poetry makes visible is what changes the world. Beyond politics or self-congratulatory commentary, this works at its deepest level when writers make visible their personal transformation in the light of events and their personal response to God. And so Emily Bronte was able to acknowledge “No coward soul is mine” and Seamus Heaney wrote “Now, to pry into roots. I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” These processes, when truthful, can lead us…...
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