Three Poems This Morning
David Hockney, Road Across The Wolds, 1996
Just as I was looking for God’s presence this morning, he came and stooped down very close to me. He came, as he often does, through some of the most magnificent words I could imagine. I am feeling these days, as we all are, so much sorrow all around us, sorrow in our weary world, sorrow as we notice how fragile our loved ones have become. Amazingly, I was presented, in my morning reading, with three different poems, each one lifting me out of sorrow and into song. I’ve been told this is how it happens. Somehow joy will blossom out of sorrow.
The first poem I heard this morning was one of those amazing Psalms:
1 PATIENTLY I waited for the LORD;
he bent down to me and listened to my cry.
2 He raised me out of the miry pit,
out of the mud and clay;
he set my feet on rock
and gave me a firm footing.
3 On my lips he put a new song,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will look with awe
and put their trust in the LORD.
4 Happy is he who puts his trust in the LORD
and does not look to the arrogant and treacherous.
5 LORD my God, great things you have done;
your wonders and your purposes are for our good;
none can compare with you.
I would proclaim them and speak of them,
but they are more than I can tell. Psalms 40:1-5
Almost beyond words, “more than I can tell,” God bends down and lifts us out of the pit. It is that patient waiting on the Lord that comes first, but then, we realize, suddenly, if we can be quiet enough, God bends down to listen to our cry. Suddenly we know, beyond our normal grasp, that God has a purpose that is good for us. We may end up hammering out a plan of action, but for now it is enough that God comes into our little space? He came very close to me this morning. I wanted to start singing.
And then came to me this morning the contemporary poet Christian Wiman. In his poem “Coming into the Kingdom,” he talks about God’s visit as if each time it is a kind of conversion. We cross over often into a new kingdom, even through our prayer. There we are bumping along in all our worry and troubles in an old dispensation, and suddenly it is as if there is another world, another realm, another kingdom.
Coming into the kingdom
I was like a man grown old in banishment,
a creature of hearsay and habit, prayerless, porous,
a survivor of myself.
Coming into the kingdom
I was like a man stealing into freedom when the
tyrant dies. . . .
Out of exile, into the kingdom, so often prayerless, so often bound up in layers of habit and hearsay, we are shocked to discover again another world out there.
And then this morning there was the remarkable Welsh poet and priest R. S. Thomas from his poem “Suddenly”:
As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker: so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. . . .
Yes, I had always known he would come. That’s what I’ve been told about prayer. But he comes, not with trumpets blaring, but unannounced, quietly. No big deal, perhaps, but it is as if our “whole being” comes to attention. That’s what happened to me. And then it’s as if we are trying to catch the sea in a cup. Everything overflows. And then we hear the singing from afar. We wade in to another kingdom where there is singing.
Isn’t it amazing how God speaks to us? Isn’t it amazing, just when we feel hemmed in by worry and darkness and fear, he comes to us, suddenly, unannounced, with a new song for our lips? It’s as if we’ve seen a new kingdom. Oh how much we want to tell the world. Isn’t it amazing how God sometimes gives us new words, not just to sing privately, but to sing out, as best we can, to a world so swept up in worry.