"All things, there, are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him. "(Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sermons and Devotional Writings, OUP)
Sometimes words and photo come together. The words of Hopkins I came across by accident while reading an issue of The Tablet. I hadn't read them before, and immediately fell in step with the peculiar rhythm and imagery of a poet I know well.
The photo is one of a set I've been working with to explore the play of light. I took these at the foot of Bennachie on a very sunny and breezy afternoon, when the tree-filtered sunlight made the grass glow like gold. That afternoon I took several photographs of grass, water, stones, and against the larger perspective of tall trees, a mountain and wide skies.
Searching for what might make a worthwhile photograph is an exercise in looking, an intentional focus on seeing, and then the effort of paying attention. The inner focus of the mind, the natural focus of the eye, are prerequisites to the thrid level focus of a camera lens. More than once I've felt the inner merging of aesthetic appreciation and a responsiveness as near to prayer as makes no difference.
Grass is a thickly textured image of human life in the Bible, and often weighted with a poignant acknowledgement of transience. "As for man his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more." (Psalm 103.15-16) The same image in Isaiah 40, occurs in one of the most powerful calls to hopefulness and new possibility in the entire Hebrew Bible. But it too is touched with transience;"All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field...The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever." (Isaiah 40.7-8)
There's the realism of a Bible which looks time and life and death with humility and hope. Yet Psalm 103 begins, "Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name." To know ourselves blessed, and to know that reality with all that is within us - mind, emotion, spirit, conscience, will, memory, hope, sorrow, joy - to know in such depth that we are blessed, that is to celebrate the mere fact, no, the miracle fact, that we live at all. And Isaiah while looking at our human temporality with unflinching honesty, does so in the context of good tidings, a comforted people, new roads and opportunities, the company of One who is incomparable, and that immense final promise to those of us who know we are as grass, and as the flowers of the field, "Those who wait on the Lord (better, those who hope in the Lord) will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles...."
So in taking the photo of golden grasses, illumined by sunlight and orchestrated by the breeze, there is that moment of realisation, that this is not forever. That life is gift, immense, immeasurable, immediate and never asked for because it was given before we ever could. So this unlooked for, unasked gift we are called to live, to inhabit our circumstances and our being, with the seriousness of joy and the freedom of responsibility. Our utterly mysterious and gratuitous existence is a life to be received with humble gratitude and shared from a gladly generous heart. Alongside the transience of grass, comes the promise of Jesus, "I have come that you might have life, and life more abundant."
It would be misleading to say all, or even much of this was in my mind when I crouched to the level of the grass to take the photo. But some stirring of the "all that is within me", was triggered, one of those mysterious nudges of the Holy Spirit I've come to trust, intimating that this image of flowering grass setting to seed is a reminder that life is God's gift, fecund, transient, and precious. Had I gone looking for words to describe such a moment of intimation, and in such a luminous place, I couldn't improve on Hopkins' lyrical yes to such beauty:
"All things, there, are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him."
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