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| Mari Lwyd image by Flying Viper on DeviantArt |
Here
is the second of our December
Novenas for the Fallen Through, which for this month are devoted to
Mary
and Mari Lwyd
and to Peace
on Earth.
If you would like to read more about this month’s
novena
you can read our first prayer here.
In
our first Novena we lifted a prayer for peace in many aspects; the
end of arms trading, of the disproportionate recruitment of the
children of the poor into the armed forces, for an end to loneliness
and poverty, to the Boxing Day hunt and to driven grouse shooting,
and for peace on the West Bank. As this cycle of prayers continues we
will connect to these themes in greater depth. Today, as our Prime
Minister Theresa May attempts to justify figures which tell us that
9,000 people are sleeping rough on the streets of England at any one
time, an increase of 134% since 2011, and that over 79,000
households, which include 120, 000 children, are without homes and
living in temporary accommodation, a rise of 65% since 2010, we turn
our attention to homelessness.
It
is hard to imagine how we can ever find peace when so many people are
without roots. It is this lack of grounding that no doubt leads to a
disproportionate number of children from working class families
being recruited into the armed forces, and it is telling in that
regard that Britain is the only country within the European Union to
allow the recruitment of 16 year olds. When we feel that we don’t
belong we become prey, but more of that on another day.
This
Novena and this time of Midwinter and Christmas are so deeply woven
with the search for ‘home’ and for a safe place in which to birth
what is vulnerable and good. Just as Mary and Joseph did in the
Christmas story, the Mari Lwyd travels from house to house at
Midwinter asking to come in. She always gains entry because those who
live with the hoofbeats of the Mari in heart and ear know that the
magic is in allowing her entry, that that is somehow how the world is
put to rights. It would be unthinkable to deny her and yet we live in
a culture now where so many are afraid to offer room, whether
metaphorically or literally.
In
Kent we have a tradition very similar to the Mari Lwyd, but here it
is called ‘Hoodening’, ‘Hodening’, or ‘Oodening’. This
folk-custom involved a wooden hobby horse, the ‘hooden horse’,
being mounted on a pole and carried by someone concealed under a
sackcloth. This was once specifically enacted in East Kent but it
spread into the west of the county in the Twentieth Century.
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| ontanomagico.altervista.org |
The
Hooden Horse was a tradition performed at Christmas time by groups of
farm labourers who would form into teams and accompany the horse
around the local area visiting houses and being offered payment.
There would have been little work for labourers on the land in the
winter and so this was a way for wealth to be shared in sparse times
in a way that offered some dignity; payment for a performance is not
the same as charitable giving. In this way hoodening echoes the
tradition of wassailing, where again agricultural labourers would
travel from house to house singing, or would bless orchards and other
crops, in return for food and money. House visiting, which is
recorded from at least the 1600s, and orchard blessing, first
recorded in St Albans in 1486, were part of a well defined and stable
social structure. By the late eighteenth century, wassailing was
thriving almost everywhere. Hoodening was also flourishing in Kent
and yet by the time of the First World War it had become extinct.
The
change in these ways of being seems to have come with the
Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, which brought with them
Enclosure, the removal of common rights to establish individual
ownership of the land, and the replacement of community
responsibility through Elizabethan Poor Relief with the Victorian
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which led to the opening of
workhouses. At each turn we become more distant from one another,
reciprocal exchange breaks down, and the better off amongst us want
to cling on to what we have lest we too should fall through. Indeed
it was the Victorians who discouraged wassailing, which allowed the
less well off amongst us to take charge of their own wellbeing, and
replaced it with the more sedate caroling and charitable giving,
where the giver decides who deserves care and in what form that care
should come. I know that many now discourage the giving of money to
the homeless, in case it is used in ways that aren’t good for
them, as though somehow in not having a roof a person also loses the
right to make the decisions, good or bad, that those of us who have
homes are daily at liberty to make.
Hoodening
suffered a similar fate to that of wassailing. In W.D Parish and W.F
Shaw’s ‘Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect’ of 1888, they claim
that ‘Hodening’ is a Kentish term for carol singing, although
they did acknowledge that it had once been attached to a custom
involving a ‘mumming or masquerade’ and a hooden horse. At that
time, Hoodening itself was still taking place in some parts of the
county but, in 1889, a letter appeared in ‘The Bromley Record’
stating that the custom had been abandoned around fifty years
previously after a woman in Broadstairs had taken fright and died at
the sight of the hooden horse!
This
fear of folk-customs allowing exchange of wealth seems to have been
ubiquitous. By the mid nineteenth century grave concerns were being
expressed that pre-Christmas street celebrations were too rowdy and
drunken and the authority’s began a campaign to establish Christmas
as a home event, rather than a communal one. Indeed, Colin and Karen
Cater in their wonderful and thought-provoking book, ‘Wassailing:
Reawakening an Ancient Folk Custom’, describe Charles Dickens’ ‘A
Christmas Carol’ as a ‘propagandist novel’ which “edits out
street based celebrations in favour of ‘the family’, and so
Christmas was tamed and with it the people of the land. But, of
course, neither is so easily subdued and hoodening is slowly being
revived. There are a number of ‘revivalist hoodeners’ in Kent,
including, I am proud to say, just down the hill from our house in
Sandgate.
In
matters of the land though Kent has always been uppity. In ‘The
Canterbury Index’ of November 2016, historian, Professor Mark
Stoyle, refers to Kent as “the most rebellious county after
Cornwall”. Although this is acknowledged to have complex reasons
much intertwined with a strong sense of regional identity, it is also
thought to have much to do with an ancient and highly unusual system
of land tenure chiefly associated with Kent known as ‘gavelkind’.
This meant that land was not held in ‘servile tenure’ but could
be inherited by the children of a tenant who died and could also be
sold as freehold. It was allowed to become home.
Today,
a committee of MPs declared homelessness in England to be a ‘national
crisis’. Chair of the committee, Labour MP Meg Hillier, described
the Government’s strategy to combat homelessness as an “abject
failure”, citing the huge increase in people sleeping rough and in
temporary accommodation.
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| thirdforcenews.com |
In
October 2017, it was reported that the number of homeless people
admitted to hospital for treatment of drug and alcohol addiction rose
by a quarter between 2014 and 2016. In November, a study found that
as many as one in twenty five people can be classed as homeless in
the worst affected areas of the UK. This is partly due to people
losing their private tenancies since cuts to housing benefits began
in 2011, whilst private sector rents have tripled over the same
period. Auditor General, Sir Amyas Morse, said that the Department
for Work and Pensions had failed to evaluate the impact of benefit
changes on homelessness. A 72 year old woman named Victoria was made
homeless when her landlord decided to sell her flat and she was
unable to find alternative accomodation. Again in November, having
been banned from begging and sleeping in shop doorways in
Middlesborough, autistic man, Bradley Grimes, who became homeless
after leaving the care system at 17 and now suffers from a brain
tumour and epilepsy, begged a judge to send him to prison rather than
leave him on the streets.
Liverpool
Council, ever rebellious, have vowed to continue to “break the law”
to stop people dying on the city streets. The City Mayor, Joe
Anderson, insists that Government guidelines which refuse support to
those who have ‘no recourse to public funds’ will lead to
vulnerable people dying. At the opening of a new rough sleeper
shelter he said, “Central Government think that the best thing to
do is to allow them to die on the streets or force them out, but I
won’t allow that in this city.”
Many
of those ‘without recourse to public funds’ are failed asylum
seekers who have travelled to Liverpool as one of the only places in
the country where they are able to lodge an appeal. In other places,
homeless EU migrants are being detained without charge, often
targeted due to information received from homeless charities such as
St Mungo’s and Thames Reach. Britain is the only country in the EU
which allows indefinite immigration detention. This policy was found
unlawful in the High Court on December 14th. The
Government insist that they target those who come to the UK with the
‘intention of sleeping rough’ but this has been rejected by the
European Commission and Crisis, who say that most of the European
nationals they support have lived in Britain for many years, some
having British children, but have fallen on hard times. Activist,
David Jones, says that anecdotal evidence suggests that some of those
deported for sleeping rough have later died on the streets in their
country of origin, reminding us that, “being homeless is not a
crime, and freedom of movement is not just for the rich.”
In
the meantime, Local Authorities in London, which has been
particularly badly affected by private rental increases, has been
found to be buying properties outside the city in order to house
people. This might seem sensible in pragmatic terms but it
constitutes a further erosion of community and connection to place.
This is why so many of the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire
remain in temporary accommodation. They refuse to be displaced by a
‘land grab’ that has been taking place since the Enclosure Acts,
dating back as far as the 1500s and before.
The
Mari Lwyd continues to pound on the earth, bangs on doors demanding
to enter, to be allowed to come home. She is followed by many lost
souls who deserve the same, who cry to be let in.
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| thelatest.com |
Novena
for the Fallen Through
Peace
on Earth
Blessed
Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy
Mothers of Peace,
Sisters
of Reconciliation,
Singers
of the Mending Song.
We
stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth
seeking
Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness,
in
the depths of winter cold.
With
you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in
the midst of anguish and despair.
We
seek a Revolution of Love.
We
expect Justice. We speak for Peace.
We
will not be shut out. We will be heard.
Room
will be made.
We
ask for nothing less than Peace on Earth.
We
cling to the stubborn hope of light in the darkness.
We
allow our waiting to become a prayer.
You
knew the meaning of home.
You
knew the pain of its loss,
of
having no safe place to rest your head.
With
you beside us on this Midwinter night
we
call for an end to the violence of homelessness,
we
seek the end of displacement,
for
the people and the land to again become one,
for
support and care to be offered in community,
from
heart to heart and hand to hand,
for
those who suffer, whether looked down upon or unseen,
to
be witnessed, to be seen, and to be heard,
for
the opening of doors that are so often slammed shut.
We
ask for those of us who have enough to feel safe enough to share,
to
see through and cast aside the fear-mongering of the media
and
those who would subdue love,
those
who benefit from the vulnerable remaining vulnerable,
from
us all feeling that we are on unstable and precarious ground,
to
see that our neighbours are everywhere, whether with homes or
without,
for
no one who is vulnerable, homeless, and alone
to
become prey to greed and the machine of Capitalism and war.
Blessed
Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy
Mothers of Peace,
Sisters
of Reconciliation,
Singers
of the Mending Song.
We
stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth
seeking
Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness,
in
the depths of winter cold.
With
you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in
the midst of anguish and despair.
We
seek a Revolution of Love.
We
expect Justice. We speak for Peace.
We
will not be shut out. We will be heard.
Room
will be made.
We
ask for nothing less than Peace on Earth.
We
cling to the stubborn hope of light in the darkness.
We
allow our waiting to become a prayer.
Mari
and Mary, you whose stories are so often misunderstood,
obscured
by fear, prejudice, and greed.
With
you beside us on this Midwinter night
we
ask for the reasons for homelessness to be revealed
for
those who are homeless amongst us not to be judged
but
for all to see that their plight is a reflection of the inequality
that
we all live under, even though some are blessed to not feel it,
to
see that those who are homeless walk a bitter edge
that
we all might come upon.
We
call for an end to blame,
to
the comfortable feeling that those who have fallen,
or
are falling, through
have
brought it on themselves or are somehow weak, or less,
for
the growing light of this new moon and the Midwinter sun
to
expose and illuminate with increasing clarity
the
greed of private landlords, the gaps in our welfare system,
the
benefit to some of separating us,
of
keeping us low and afraid.
Blessed
Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy
Mothers of Peace,
Sisters
of Reconciliation,
Singers
of the Mending Song.
We
stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth
seeking
Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness,
in
the depths of winter cold.
With
you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in
the midst of anguish and despair.
We
seek a Revolution of Love.
We
expect Justice. We speak for Peace.
We
will not be shut out. We will be heard.
Room
will be made.
We
ask for nothing less than Peace on Earth.
We
cling to the stubborn hope of light in the darkness.
We
allow our waiting to become a prayer.
You
whose stories and spirits are so woven into your own lands,
the
fertile hills of Palestine, the wild hills of Wales.
With
you beside us on this Midwinter night
we
ask to again come into right relationship
with
the land and with each other,
knowing
that equality must be a constant work
and
a constant prayer,
a
righting of what becomes unbalanced,
valuing
that as an endless call to mindfulness and attention,
to
listening to one another and the earth beneath our feet.
In
a world where the human spirit
is
constrained in smaller and smaller boxes,
let
all seek the liberation of belonging,
of
knowing our ground,
of
digging in, claiming our roots.
May
all who are without a safe roof above their heads
find
a home that is warm and good.
Let
none knock at the door of justice and not be let in.
Let
none find that there is no room.
And
let all those who are of good heart,
whether
homed or unhomed,
stand
together against homelessness in all its forms.
We
listen for the hoofbeat of the Mari Lwyd,
we
listen for the revolutionary Magnificat of Mary,
we
look to the Star fallen to earth, sing the Spirit in,
gather
up the pieces of broken hope,
weave
starshine in our hair,
stand
with the saints with starlight at their brow,
knowing
that we also shine.
Like
all that is born, Sun and Son,
vulnerable
and new in the midst of this deepest dark,
May
we be undefended and undefeated,
bright
with possibility and hope reborn.
Blessed
Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy
Mothers of Peace,
Sisters
of Reconciliation,
Singers
of the Mending Song.
We
stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth
seeking
Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness,
in
the depths of winter cold.
With
you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in
the midst of anguish and despair.
We
seek a Revolution of Love.
We
expect Justice. We speak for Peace.
We
will not be shut out. We will be heard.
Room
will be made.
We
lift the second shard of a shattered star.
We
allow the possibility of belonging,
of
home, to sink into our bones,
allow
the wild hope of Peace on Earth to shine.
The
lights are going on.
For this we pray.
Aho mitake oyasin, amen, blessed be. Inshallah.
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| 'Singing the Pwnco' Credit: John Isaac (found on https://grumpyoldwitchcraft.com/2014/11/10/all-hallows-gathering/) |
References and further information:
Homelessness
increased by Government welfare reforms ~
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41241021
On homeless EU
migrants ~
https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/dec/20/brexit-bonfire-legal-protection-homeless-eu-migrants
Liverpool Council
breaks the law in order to stop homeless deaths on the streets ~
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/liverpool-council-continue-break-law-14037185
Homeless Link ~
working to end homelessness ~ https://www.homeless.org.uk/
Shelter ~
http://www.shelter.org.uk/
Solidarity, not
charity ~
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2017/12/18/instead-charity-heres-can-show-solidarity-homeless-people-london-christmas/
