Cries In The Darkness, Requital In The Light

We battle against not only the agony of destruction, carnage, and death everywhere now around us, but also with our own response.

Soon enough, paralysis overwhelms the horror; itself replaced, swiftly, by despair.

Then, anger.

An anger sweet, and pure, and righteous, and human.

An anger cold enough to unsheathe our courage, yet hot enough to stir us forward.

Courage demands that all things be made right again.

And it will make it so – or die in the trying.

Still, these are the times when we cry out in the darkness.

And our cries become our prayers.

But, deep within, we fear that our cries will fail to reach up close enough.

Or worse, are heard but are yet dismissed.

Gerald Manley Hopkins helps us to understand this battle, this mortal drama with the divine.

He describes as it as “warfare of my lips in truth.”

Manley’s words seem especially poignant this morning.

May God bless the people of Paris.

May God bless us all.

My Prayer Must Meet A Brazen Heaven

My prayers must meet a brazen heaven

And fail or scatter all away.

Unclean and seeming unforgiven

My prayers I scarcely call to pray.

I cannot buoy my heart above;

Above it cannot entrance win.

I reckon precedents of love,

But feel the long success of sin.

My heaven is brass and iron my earth:

Yea iron is mingled with my clay,

So harden’d is it in this dearth

Which praying fails to do away.

Nor tears nor tears this clay uncouth

Could mould, if any tears there were.

A warfare of my lips in truth,

Battling with God, is now my prayer.

Peace

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