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TO THE HERITAGE CENTRE

WALKING AWAY

Father Thomas Couper, Chaplain

I love the poem ‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis. In it, when the time comes. Day-Lewis’ poem suggests that this is like
Day-Lewis recounts a vivid memory from 18 years before. the love we receive from God. It is a love that is radically present
It’s the beginning of the school year and as a loving father he but one that does not control or coerce, that doesn’t demand
is watching his son play his first game of soccer. However, anything back, but gives us the freedom to respond, to shape
after the game, the boy, instead of checking in with his dad as our future, to become the best version of ourselves.
he may have done earlier, goes off hesitantly with his school When God said, “Let there be…” he gave the universe a life of its
mates. He has his own life with them now. This is just one own. As an Anglican school, we join with Him in lovingly saying
tiny example of the many scorching ordeals that all parents those same words to each boy who walks through our gates:
go through. Whether it’s dropping children off at kindergarten, “Let there be…” The boys will do the rest.
high school, university or watching them get married. Each
new parting is a new loss. Walking Away – by Cecil Day-Lewis
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
In his wonderful book, The poetry pharmacy, William Sieghart
writes: “this is the terrible paradox of parenthood; we dedicate A sunny day with leaves just turning,
our lives to creating the very outcome we dread the most – the The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
letting go our children. In a perverse way, good parents are always Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
working towards their own heartbreak, and we cannot do right
by our children without opening ourselves up to this pain for their Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
sake.” He goes on to say that, “assuaging our own neediness by With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
clutching a child to us, will only damage them – and by extension, Into a wilderness, the gait of one
it will damage us too, more than the letting go ever could.”
Who finds no path where the path should be.
Day-Lewis ends his poem with these profound lines: That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show – Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go. Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
One of the painful facts of life is that unless we leave one place Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
or stage in life, we cannot begin another; we cannot grow. Good Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
parents and, indeed, good schools must love children in such How selfhood begins with a walking away,
a way that they have confidence to move through these stages And love is proved in the letting go.

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