Sometimes when I come across a complicated piece of writing I try to write it as a prose-poem to see if that helps make it clearer.
Here's an extract from Denise Levetov's diary, late in life, as she works out what faith and love and hope mean as the realities and vocational demands God makes on those God loves.
By breaking a long, broken but connected paragraph into a series of sentences arranged for slowed down reading, the reader can begin to overhear Levertov's hesitant and honest estimate of her own experience of God's love and her own limited, perhaps even grudging, response.
I am interested in her take on gratitude and its relation to love, indeed gratitude as response to love which, as it is felt and expressed, is by a work of grace beyond our knowing and doing transmuted into love reciprocated. The bold emphases in the extract below are original, and can be used as roadmarkings for her thinking
And the love of God - what is it?
Don't all the writers speak of it
emphasize its basis in God's love for us?
Few speak of it as a phenomenon
that could arise purely
out of admiration and awe.
The contemplation of God's power and glory
gives rise to awe,
but it is the idea that we, as a class,
and every I as a unique creature,
matter to God,
that gives rise to love.
And this is what binds gratitude and love together
(and gratitude for my life is what I do feel,
along with amazement at the existence of anything at all
when God could have rested in his own all sufficiency...)
So perhaps my gratitude to God will in time
lead me to experience that love for God
(for Christ) which I'm aware of lacking.
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