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Soul Size
At our IHM meetings this past weekend, Sister Susan read this beautiful piece from the epilogue of the play A Sleep of Prisoners by Christopher Fry.
The human heart can go the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our Time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake
But will you wake for pity’s sake?
* * *
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This is thought provoking and also quite wonderful. Thanks for sharing Sr Julie!
I like the picture as well as the words!
That is incredible!
Definitely a worthy meditation!
Lovely.
So is the poet right? We all liked the poem – why? What does it mean to you? to me?
Are we actually at the cusp of an “upstart spring?” Are we thankful to be living in the now,”when wrong/ Comes up to face us everywhere?”
What was it that grabbed us in this poem?
I can’t stop thinking about the poem. I’ve been very discouraged lately about news – world news, national news, church news – and the other day, on one of my posts on FB I remember writing that sometimes I just want to sit out in the middle of the road and cry.
But this poem has made me think of two others: Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, The world is charged with the grandeur of God, and one by W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming.
The Yeats poem is very grim – and speaks of things falling apart, the center not holding, anarchy loosed upon the world.
The Hopkins poem cries out in almost despair, “Why do men then not reck his rod?” and speaks the obvious: “All is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil,/ And wears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell. . . ” But then it moves to affirmation: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things:” . . . “morning at the brown brink eastward springs –/Because the Holy Spirit over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
This poem by Christopher Fry gives me hope – so maybe I won’t sit out in the middle of the road just now to weep. I pray that truly we are living through the beginnings of a hidden spring thaw. Please God.