https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4759-9757
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Abstract
John Bradburne’s (1921–1979) poetics of sacred space and sacred waters highlights a geo-specific correlation between theology and topophilia. There is a world of water enclosed within the sacred woods and mountains, rocks, grottoes, and caves where this lay Franciscan servant of God prayed and had his ecstatic visions. The topophilia and cosmology of the Canticle of the Creatures of Saint Francis underlie Bradburne’s poetic inspiration, as waters flow in profusion from fountains, lakes, rivers, wells, and pools. The scope of the present research is to chart Bradburne’s Franciscan and Marian devotion and the dynamics determining the sacralisation of spaces and lustral waters. Thus, the action of Bradburne bathing patients in the Mutemwa leper colony near Mutoko, together with the pool of water on Mount Chigona where Bradburne bathed, contextualised a space of purification, contemplation, and harmony, while the civil war raged around Mashonaland in Zimbabwe. The element of water seems to map out Bradburne’s mystic life, from his birthplace near the Lake District and Devon to Lourdes and Assisi, to India, the waters of Galilee, and the Libyan oasis—and, eventually, to the pool on Mount Chigona. Since Bradburne’s death, the Mount has become a site of pilgrimage and devotion.
Acknowledgements
We wish to acknowledge the gracious permission of the secretary of the John Bradburne Memorial Society, Kate Macpherson, for the reproduction of all poems from the online archive database (https://www.johnbradburnepoems.com). The corpus was compiled and edited by David Crystal.
Notes
1 Sacred mountains have been subject to growing interest, as featured in work by Ulrich Berner (Citation2020), among others. A second edition of Edwin Bernbaum’s Sacred Mountains of the World was published in 2022 (first edition 1992). In this publication, the focus on Africa is on eastern Africa and Kilimanjaro and on the Drakensberg range and the Tsodilo Hills (Bernbaum Citation2022, 180–195).
2 During a conversation with the author in Perugia, October 8, 2021, Enrico Solinas, the postulator for Bradburne’s beatification cause, referred to the need to preserve his grave. The importance of graveyards had also been recognised by other authors, like Michel Foucault.
3 All extracts from poems are reproduced, with permission, from the online archive database (see https://www.johnbradburnepoems.com).
4 Bradburne’s Franciscan theology expands the poetics of “thisness” (haecceitas), derived from Duns Scotus, and the poetic vision of Gerald Manly Hopkins, as both are recurrent intertextual references (Crystal Citation2017, 395). Scotus, likewise, represents the lepers as a paradigm for understanding creation (Sheldrake Citation2001, 29). Moreover, water is the physical element for cleansing and metaphysical redemption, whether we consider miracles of healing waters or the pious act of washing and bathing the lepers, as carried out by Bradburne. The word “bath” occurs in several poems, and the laughter of a baby splashing and having a bath epitomises innocence and joy.
5 The Italian original reads: “Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sor’aqua, la quale è multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta”. The text is one of the earliest documents of Italian literature in vernacular form.
6 The incipit of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country describes the road to Ixopo and its hills as “lovely, beyond any singing of it” ([1948] 2002, 7). It is a paean to the immemorial sacredness of African soil, inspired by the revelation to Moses on Mount Horeb: “‘Do not come any closer,’ God said. ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground’” (Deuteronomy 3:5; NIV). This finds a parallel in Paton’s “Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed” ([1948] 2002, 7). Saint Francis on Mount La Verna is depicted without his sandals. The Ethiopian armies of Emperor Tewodros and Meneleik, and the Zulu Chaka with his warriors, fought lightly on bare feet, in physical contact with the sacred soil of their ancestors, thereby receiving power and strength (Masiola Citation2023). This historical fact recalls the myth of the Libyan king, the giant Antaeus, who struggled against Hercules, renewing his strength as he set foot upon his mother earth, Gea. Regarding the ascent to the Mount, the call Bradburne experiences is recorded in “The Call at Night”: “so quickly I dressed and climbed the hill / ‘Chigona’ called: an enthralling still” (October 6–7, 1973). His experience in the Holy Land is indicated by Mount Horeb in the Shakespearean poem “Out of the Tempest” (May 7, 1969), in which “her” referes to Our Lady:
7 Sheldrake notes that “there is a persistent tension in Christianity between what is sometimes referred to as place or placeness or, as I prefer, between the local and universal dimensions of place. As a matter of fact, in general, intense experiences of place often provide people with their first inchoate intimations of transcendence or the sacred. Place is both this, here, and now, and at the same time more than ‘this’, a pointer to ‘elsewhere’” (2001, 30).
8 Inyanga or Nyangani, the highest mount in Zimbabwe, with its rivers and waterfall, is considered in oral traditions to be sacred territory, long feared by people.
9 “Mtemwa” means “you are cut off”.
10 Bradburne had received a copy of the Bhagavadgītā. The Sanskrit poem narrates a battle that was fought on the plain of Kurukshetra, a geographic location and a city that still exists. In the central section of the epic, the God Krishna grants a cosmic revelation to the warrior prince Arjuna. In Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha ([1922] 1951), the final vision is that of the eternal flow of the river into the ocean, coming back in the form of rain, as revelation cannot be expressed in words but only in a shared ecstatic vision. In this connection, the Jesuit Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) synthesises the mystical experience and spirituality in Le lieu de l’autre: “La spiritualité, en tant qu’elle est une expression, reconnâit une articulation du langage sur l’impossible à dire, et elle se situe donc en cette même limite où ‘ce dont on ne peut parler’ est également ‘ce dont on ne peut pas ne pas parler’” (2005, 45) (Spirituality, in as much as it is an expression, recognises an articulation through language of that which is impossible to say, and it is therefore located at the limit where “what we cannot talk about” is also “what we cannot not talk about”).
11 In Siddhartha the river is metaphysical and also a real geographic space. In the words of Vasudeva the ferryman, all the voices of creation are in the river; one needs to learn the secret of the river, as “the river is everywhere at once, at its origin and at its mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at the same time, and for it only the present exists, no shadow of the past, no shadow of the future” (Hesse [1922] 1951, 147).
12 Recent archeological excavations have located the Shiloeam (Breikhat ha Shiloa), a system of rock-cut pools on the southern slope of the City of David in Jerusalem. The Bethesda (Beth Hesda, House of Mercy), also identified as the Fountain of the Virgin, has been located near the Lion’s Gate in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, near the Church of Saint Anne. This is not to be confused with Bethsaida, a town in Galilee. Bradburne refers to Our Lady as Beth, which in Hebrew means “house”. In South Africa, New Bethesda is also a village in the Eastern Cape at the foot of the Sneeuberge.