…And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
— G. M. Hopkins
If you’ve ever seen me post this fragment in the last ten years, it’s because I was watching the horizon to see whether life or death would rise. It’s for when babies are coming, particularly if fraught or early; it’s for emergencies and deathbeds. It’s for waiting with the sovereign Lord in this now and not yet.
Tonight, I watch the horizon over Iran. Our government threatens grave things over a nation of about 90 million souls.
Image bearers: each and every one stamped with God’s fingerprint, just like all those who have been carelessly handled in conflicts all over the world. The weight is great.
As this all ticks in the background, I’ve been devouring books. First, “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles. Sixteen year old American boys at boarding school as their war (WWII) days loom.
There’s an exchange toward the end that pierced me. Here it is, redacted slightly so as to avoid spoilers:
“’[Friend],’ my voice broke, but I went on, ‘[Friend] you wouldn’t be any good in the war, even if [major plot point].’
A look of amazement fell over him. It scared me, but I knew what I said was important and right, and my voice found that full tone voices have when they are expressing something long-felt and long-understood and released at last. ‘They’d get you some place at the front and there’d be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you’d be over with the Germans or the [Japanese], asking if they’d like to field a baseball team against our side. You’d be sitting in one of their command posts, teaching them English. Yes, you’d get confused and borrow one of their uniforms, and you’d lend them one of yours. Sure, that’s what would happen. You’d get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You’d make a mess, a terrible mess, [Friend], out of the war.’”
I pray that in the best way, somehow a terrible mess is made out of the current war. That life and resurrection would out, and the little gods would recall that one day they will cast all their crowns. That when we live by the sword, it is said, we can die by it.
And once you read “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles, try “A Morbid Taste for Bones” by Ellis Peters (the hilarities and entanglements when a monastery demands a random village’s saint’s relics for their own clout!). And finally, consider “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke. I’m still in the afterglow, but one theme is the inability of the power-mad to perceive beauty and the interconnectedness of all matters.
Let us pray and groan, read and think, perceive and guard. The Carolina wrens have chosen their new nest site, to name just one of the glorious surprises at hand.