To Live in the Mercy of God

By Denise Levertov

To lie back under the tallest

oldest trees. How far the stems

rise, rise

               before ribs of shelter

                                           open!

To live in the mercy of God. The complete

sentence too adequate, has no give.

Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

stony wood beneath lenient

moss bed.

And awe suddenly

passing beyond itself. Becomes

a form of comfort.

                      Becomes the steady

air you glide on, arms

stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

To hear the multiple silence

of trees, the rainy

forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,

                as salt water

                would hold you,

                                        once you dared.

         

                  .

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured

waterfall flinging itself

unabating down and down

                              to clenched fists of rock.

Swiftness of plunge,

hour after year after century,

                                                   O or Ah

uninterrupted, voice

many-stranded.

                              To breathe

spray. The smoke of it.

                              Arcs

of steelwhite foam, glissades

of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

rage or joy?

                              Thus, not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

                      flung on resistance.

..............................

A poem for those times we are taken aback by the givenness of life, and the inner imperative that reminds us of the givingness that is at the heart of what Jesus called life more abundant. I've often thought about a cycle of 31 poems, collected into a booklet, and used one a day for 6 months, call it Psalms of the Poets perhaps.

 

The hunger for awe and the awareness of the vast rock faced mountain that is God's categorical imperative to seek, and climb and risk falling in order to climb; or to live the alternative metaphor, standing in the spray of torrential water hurtling over the cliff, the self-sacrifice and passionate surrender of that

"............................Vast

flood of mercy

                     flung on resistance."

 

Levertov was such a brilliant expositor of human longing and divine elusiveness, human devotion and divine amplitude, our capacity for finitude and God's infinite mercy.

And so, today begins, with a willingness to lie beneath the tree, stand barefoot at the waterfall, know however fleetingly, the drenching spray of mercy.