Bleeding hearts. it's the name of a flower. And it's obvious why. Those heart shaped flowers, pink veined but with the deepening red gathering as tear shaped pendant drops. A heart broken, the promise of love now wounded, the flowers become bleeding hearts.
The colours are startling in Spring and early summer, perhaps because that is the season of life, and the recovery of growth and vitality. I noticed them while walking in Crathes Castle gardens on a warm sunlit afternoon.
Earlier I had been writing something and had quoted the words of Paul in Romans 5, "God commends his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." That profound and unsettling truth links divine love with human sin, and does so by proclaiming a causal connection between the death of Jesus, divine judgement, human sin and divine love. What's that all about? The question, no less bewildering for its contemporary informality, is much to the point.
God is love is one of the key affirmations of the Christian Gospel, embedded throughout the New Testament and explained and wondered at in the writings of Paul, John and Peter.
When Peter talks of humans being redeemed by the precious blood of Christ he is saying that on Calvary, love lies bleeding.
When Paul affirms he lives "by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me" he is growing towards an atonement theology in which love lies bleeding, and the wounds are borne into the heart of God.
When John has Jesus say, "I if I be lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to me...for God so loved the world", he is articulating the heart of God, and anticipating Golgotha where love will lie bleeding, and die.
The juxtaposition of red heart-shaped flowers with pendant tear drops, and the imagery of the crucified Christ, and that name, "Bleeding Hearts" didn't prepare me for one of those moments when there is a near audible click as several things fit together. Later that day I was reading some poems by R S Thomas. When I am in an interrogative mood, I go looking for fellowship with RST. And I came upon this poem while still thinking of those flowers.
Before writing more, here it is:
Which
And in the book I read:
God is love. But lifting
my head, I do not find it
so. Shall I return
to my book and, between
print, wander an air
heavy with the scent
of this one word? Or not trust
language, only the blows that
life gives me, wearing them
like those red tokens with which
an agreement is sealed.
He too is asking the question, God is love; "What's that all about?" The poem is a confession, but not of faith. He confesses that he is unpersuaded. God is love? "I do not find it so". Thomas scorned sentiment as a substitute for hard thinking. That first question which takes up the second stanza is a rhetorical disclaimer. Of course not. Love isn't a heavily scented word, if it is then it isn't love, and definitely not the kind of love that, for love of the other, lies bleeding. Forget the word, says Thomas. Not language, but life experience might better exegete the meaning of love. "The blows life gives me", and the consequent grief, sadness, loss, and suffering we each endure, these are real, and have to be lived with and lived through. It isn't that Thomas doesn't believe in any kind of love. This second question which takes seriously life's suffering, is the other option. Do not trust language when it is not adequate to the realities it seeks to describe, is Thomas's point. Another astringent thinker, P T Forsyth, complained "it is hard for words to stretch to the measure of eternal things". That I think is what Thomas is saying. Trust "only the blows that life gives me", and wear them like the red molten wax, "red tokens with which an agreement is sealed". But what does that mean?
Faith in God is not about feeling, not even about clear disciplined reasoning, whether about love or hope or peace or whatever. Faith, in this poem, is the capacity to trust the life we are living and to trust that our life, in all its pain and joy, is underwritten by a sealed agreement between - well between which parties? Thomas avoids the word covenant, but the hint is broad enough. And those red tokens of melted wax, red and liquid, and then solidifying into permanence, become a metaphor for that love which though inexplicable, and forever evasive of language however fragrant or precise, is nevertheless real and to be trusted.
And perhaps for Thomas the priest, the sealed agreement of the divine love that lies bleeding, is recalled and reaffirmed at each Eucharist, when faith again takes hold of the symbols hinted at in those red tokens. And in the reaching out to take the bread and wine redolent of the suffering Christ, faith knows, or at least surmises, that 'those blows that life gives me" are caught up into something eternal, and that, defying all attempts at linguistic control, we call Love.
Great writing man!
Posted by: Alone shayar | June 20, 2024 at 08:40 PM