The Day of Saints - Day 33, Meriadoc/Meriadek/Meriasek

Saint Meriadoc aka Meriasek etc, patron saint of Camborne. More has been written about this saint than some others, including a play written in middle-Cornish known as known as Beunans Meriasek. Meriadoc was, it is said, the son of a duke in Brittany, well educated, but having been ordained as a priest he retired to a hermitage (as you do ;) ) at Pontivy where he built a chapel. There he was visited by many people and did miraculous cures for sickness. He is reputed to have healed many lepars and disabled people, to have driven off the highwaymen of Josselin through prayer, to have made water spring from solid rock, and to have calmed a storm (Wikipedia). In Cornwall, a new episode to his life was added in which he founded a chapel in Camborne, and caused a well to spring up, as many saints reportedly did! Arousing the ire of King Teudar, who also has appeared in the legends of Breage and Gwinear, Meriadoc hid under a rock from the king who was trying to kill him. Later he returned to Brittany where he died (See Orme, The Saints of Cornwall, p.188 for more).

Patronal banner at Camborne

I spent a very wet morning trying to find out about Meridoc, and I am grateful for the person in the office at the parish church who opened up especially for me when the church was locked.

Camborne Parish Church

Stephen Fry's poetry primer/tutorial book introduced me a form known as a Villanelle. It was apparently the reason he ended up writing such a book, having explained it to a friend who snorted in derision to hear that it is, "a pastoral Italian form from the sixteenth century written in six three-line stanzas where the first line of the first stanza is used as a refrain to end the second and forth stanzas and the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third, fifth and sixth".

Yesterday, I was in a coffee shop in Plymouth trying to write a new poem but getting nowhere, when I spotted on the wall an extracted pair of lines from a Dylan Thomas poem. It is one commonly read at funerals etc. Alongside the irony of snippets of serious poetry being used to flog coffee, I was reminded of Stephen Fry's observation that this famous poem is a villanelle. (It can be found here, by the way).

Words from the *ahem* latte Dylan Thomas

I decided that I would take the references to Meriadoc being involved with the healing of lepers and imagine an encounter into the form of a villanelle, quite a taxing form to write in. It is hardly Dylan Thomas, but then I don't expect to be quoted on a cafe wall.

I have written in the idea of repersonaling the voided/disfigured through touching to the often thought untouchable. In my ministerial work, I have found that touch has a valuable part to play in a ministry of healing, along with prayer and keeping open the possibility of the miraculous.

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FOR MERIASEK

Touching the Void

Where is love more than where love heals?

Let sorrow rise if sense is banned;

And that is how a leper feels.

No turn disfigurement conceals,

(There is no shame-free way to stand),

Where is love more than where love heals?

As torturing thievery, it steals,

Leaves in exchange a scabrous brand,

And that is how a leper feels.

Say, is this how God self-reveals?

Could better worlds he not have planned?

Where is love more than where love heals?

Alone in hope, with me he kneels,

In prayer, close drawing on the sand,

And that is how a leper feels.

On radish lesions, skin that peels,

At his own pace, he lays his hand,

Where is love more than where love heals?

And that is how a leper feels.

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