He
Called
Table of Contents
Foreward
Introduction
Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew
Zacchaeus
Wayfarer
Bartimaeus
When Misery Meets Mercy
Herod’s Lament
Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son
Fatherhood
Confession
Abiding Preference
He Lifts Up the Poor
A Crumb
I Believe
The Bread of Life
How to Feed Five Thousand
Body Building
The Least
Lord of the Sabbath
God’s Passion
Seed Sonnet
Awaiting
She Gives Us Time
The Sign of Conversion
The Star of Mercy
Living Memory
Constant Crèche
The Infant Mary
Lineage
Mystery’s Conception
The Visitation
The Wine to Come
Rebirth
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Tiers of Bloom
Our Lady of God’s Garden
Maris Stella
Mother’s Up Before Dawn
Mother of Mercy
The Way
Magnify the Word
The Road of Discipleship
The Pain of Ready
The Lowest Place
Space for Difference
Knot Still Tied?
Zechariah in the Temple
Anna the Prophetess
My Angel
The Agony in the Garden
Passion Villanelle
Formed by Sacrifice
Freely, Forcefully
Death and Love
One for All
The Transfiguration
The Widow’s Cry
Do You Know This Man?
Greater Light
Unparalyzed
Walking on Waves
Sabbath Healing
The Fruit of Mercy
Jesus, My Parable
Unflattering
What Matters to God
Transfigured
The Risen Christ
Love’s Grit
Motions of Mercy
Ash Wednesday
Desert Rain
First Alms
The Widow’s Mite
Almsgiving
A Mantle for All Seasons
He Called
A Fisher of Hearts
Waive the Sword
Saint Joan
The Baptist’s Body
Saint Bartholomew
Saint Dismas
Foreword
In his 1999 letter to artists, Saint John Paul II commended the work of those who, in a continual pursuit of beauty, offer their own creative gifts to the world. Indeed, such people help to ensure that a steady supply of beauty remains in our world. It is a task, the pope suggested, that arises from a keen sense of the satisfaction God himself must have enjoyed in beholding the work of his own hands at the origin of time: “Captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colors and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.”
When speaking of poets of the early Church, the Holy Father said they were “nourished by the pure sap of the Gospel.” Quoting Saint Paulinus of Nola, who said that “our only art is faith and our music Christ,” the Holy Father provides Christian poets a very inspiring standard to keep always before them. Indeed, an artist whose inspiration is faith, whose constant companion is Jesus Christ, will find no shortage of material on which to exercise his or her craft.
The contents of this book are one poet’s attempts to capture the beauty, the drama, and, if one may put it this way, the “human side” of the mysteries of faith and the presence of God. T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Yet it is the poet’s privilege and avocation to help expand our capacity to see and bear more and more of reality, to lead us further up and further in to the beauty and goodness of our God. Rita Simmonds has done just that.
Rita Simmonds has offered her creative writing to the readers of MAGNIFICAT for many years. She has written beautifully and artfully about Our Lady, the events of Christ’s life—especially his miracles and his Passion and Resurrection—and also her own personal experience of prayer and living the faith in the modern world. Rita’s poetic vision is thoroughly Christian—she feels deep within her bones that the presence of God, and the call of God to each human soul, is deeply personal and concrete, corresponding to the inner longings and needs of the human heart.
Each poem in this volume is, in reality, a meditation on the faith. It is my hope that this book will invite and aid deeper pondering of the mysteries of faith until the day, please God, we behold him unveiled, when his splendor will be on full display, delighting us and inciting our love for and ever. In the words of another poet:
I believe I shall see the LORD’s goodness in
the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD, take courage;
be stouthearted, wait for the LORD!
(Ps 27:13-14)
Fr. Sebastian White, O.P.
Editor-in-Chief, MAGNIFICAT
Yonkers, New York
Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul
the Apostle, 2020
Introduction
I accepted the invitation to write an introduction for this volume of Rita Simmonds’ poetry with a bit of trepidation. Though I have written for many years on spiritual topics, this marks my first attempt at reacting to and appreciating the work of a poet—albeit one I know well, both from the pages of MAGNIFICAT and, I am grateful to say, personally.
Not knowing exactly how to approach this task, I decided to do it in much the same way I study the saints. When I approach a new saint, I read about him or her until a quote, a story, or a detail of the person’s life jumps out at me. The starting point for shaping a portrait of the saint is always this aspect that strikes me, moves me, and makes me want to know him or her better. When I came to Rita’s collection, I was seeking the same sort of spark, the same tug upon my heart.
I was not disappointed. Given the task, over many years, of crafting poems based on the Gospels, Rita has reliably traced the personal paths of many of their main characters. She has made a study of human beings in the most important moment for any human life, the moment of the encounter with Christ.
Through Rita’s words, we meet Zechariah and Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus and Bartholomew, Peter and Matthew—each of them touched and decisively changed by their encounter with Christ. Rita tells their stories in such a way that we come to see that they are remarkably like us. We are drawn into their histories, become privy to their struggles. We recognize the keenness of their need and discover it to be our own.
In “The Transfiguration,” we meet a Peter in near-despair, as he quivers in hiding, far from the place where his Lord is hung up to die. Forsaken, he rues the day that Jesus was transfigured before him:
Tabor is a memory
Or merely distant dream
That left when came the agony,
That shattered when you screamed.
Before Christ in his Passion, Peter cries out for Christ in his glory! How many times have I myself known this sorrow, the anguish before a promise that now appears to be betrayed, the desolation of Holy Saturday?
But if Peter’s ragged and raging cry is like mine, so is Zechariah’s terse complaint:
My life is reaching smoke and rote.
I ask
I receive
but do not believe. (“Zechariah in the Temple”)
I, too, have struggled within my hardened shell, skeptical to the core. How many times have I refused to believe?
And then there is Herod, who killed the man who most fascinated him, sacrificing John the Baptist’s life just so that he could save face. Through Rita’s lines, his drama draws us in.
And now my whole life
is a cringe
at the platter brought in.
I see his head turn on the plate.
His mouth still proclaims
the Kingdom
I struggle to hate. (“Herod’s Lament”)
As much as I hate to admit it, I know something of this cringe, of that moment when the consequences of my unconfessed sin play out before me. I am moved to pray: Grant me courage, O Lord! Forgive me, O Lord!
Time and again, as I read Rita’s poems, I find myself saying, yes, this is me. I know the dead weight of the millstone about my neck (“Mother of Mercy”). I have felt the sun baking my back as I wait to see who will cast the first stone (“When Misery Meets Mercy”). I know this isolation and fear, this darkness and uncertainty.
