Words and Lines

The Chapel Path

by Tris Kerslake

Hack out the softness of the dissipated South, it lacks all value and advantage. Leave off the yielding contours when you walk the chapel path, and feel instead each stone, each worthy pinch of praise for one who never lets the doubt permit a single foot to stray. The flock, the sheep are all inside and cannot see the sky and foreigner, you comprehend that harshness is the only way to Christ. The chapel path is clear.

Sing loud. Unmake the common roof with hymns of barter sure of heaven’s claim. Beat your life into a shape that fits, erode in rigid shreddings all your sorry form, scraped knees are nothing to the hassocks in the pew. Pray the epithet of Southerner does never spoil your welcome here, the evening English in the cautious pubs, the quiet laugh that makes you less than them. Listen, as the rugby comes second only to the bitter beer.

Avoid all chance of weighing life with life, you cannot win, that battle is a holy one. Brethren, fiercer by the hill, anointing cuts with stinging oil might judge no scars are yours, your flatland soul effete. Do not relax in accent or in deed, for they will joke and drink and think the wicked lie. Forget the years you knelt on blue-cold flags with hands too numb to turn the gilt-edge page, unseens are in this place. Leave them to the chapel path.