Over 40 years ago I read W E Sangster's book, The Craft of Sermon Illustration. It is still a workmanlike book for preachers prepared to do the hard work of careful exegesis and imaginative exposition rooted in the text of the Bible. Amongst other pieces of very clear advice to preachers was, read poetry. As a young man I took that to heart and have never regretted it. Most of my life now I've read poetry. A poem is itself an act of interpretation, and an example of the art of self-interpretation. Whether human life, the world around, or the depths and heights of human experience, poetry is a process of reflection, illumination and imaginative response to the world around us and within us.
Early on I came across a poem by Jean Ingelow called 'Regret'. In particular, four lines have remained as memorised wisdom which at different times in my life has provided a way to understand, and if not understand then to accept, and try to learn from, those experiences that cast a shadow over everything else.
I find myself going back to those lines in the aftermath of sudden bereavement and the raw immediacy of grief following our daughter Aileen's death. They can sound trite and more like timid wishful thinking. They may seem less than honest about the bewildered sorrow and gnawing regrets when someone we love as dear as life itself dies, and is now beyond further words of love, comfort, explanation or apology. But here they are:
For life is one, and in its warp and woof
There runs a thread of gold that glitters fair;
And sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet
Where there are sombre colours.
Now I've designed and worked tapestries for years. And sometimes they have been born out of life crises and they became a way of creating brief interludes of equilibrium. You know you're stressed when the thread is pulled too tight; and the discipline of counting cotton strands, and mixing tone and colour requires an attentiveness that gives the mind a break from more painful realities.
So those words describe an image that has serious and persuasive power for me, especially those times when my own life tapestry has had to be worked with sombre colours. In the overwhelming sense of loss and disorientation that befalls us with the death of someone we have loved as life of our life, it is hard to see any light, and no thread of gold is either apparent or seems even appropriate. For grief compels and requires of each of us our personal encounter with the reality of who and what we have lost...a journey the Psalmist calls "the valley of the shadow of death."
And yet. As a Christian I believe in that thread of gold. As a looked for pencil line of light along the horizon of the long night; as a seed of hope planted in the deep and dark soil of Calvary, awaiting resurrection; as one whose life is a following faithfully after Jesus, believing his words about resurrection and life, the peace only God can give, the love that never lets go, the forgiveness that never turns away. Or that thread of gold glimpsed in the ordinary yet extraordinary kindness and prayers and companionship of those who have come close to share the sorrow and whose love glitters in our darkness. Threads of gold, woven through sombre colours.
Those sombre colours are inevitable, even necessary, for the integrity and balance of the pattern that is our shared life, and every human life. For myself, the thread of gold that runs through my life is neither sentimental optimism nor certainty based on disallowing hard questions. The thread of gold that runs through my life, and that glitters against the sombre colours, is faith that takes the risk of trusting God. I believe deeply, and try to trust daily, the Eternal self-giving love of God revealed in Jesus - his words, his ministry, his death and his resurrection. In Jesus God placed redeeming love and recreative purpose at the centre of all reality.
Such faith clearly gives no immunity to heartbreaking loss, nor does it allow us to evade grief beyond words, nor does it defend us from that inner brokenness of human hearts that may never fully heal. But it does draw those deeply wounding experiences of bereavement, grief, suffering and loss into a larger pattern of meaning. The redemption of suffering, the reconciliation of a broken world, the forgiveness of all we have wronged and all that has wronged us, the renewal of hope in despairing hearts, the restoring of relationships sliced apart by death; however we describe this world's and our own brokenness, love is at work from all eternity, and came into our human history with healing purpose and the gift of a radical hope. The Cross and Resurrection are the beating heart of the Christian gospel, the place where finally and definitively God takes ownership of a shattered creation, and remakes it towards a new future.
For me faith in that kind of God is the thread of gold that glitters, - sometimes, - in the woven texture of our lives. The sombre colours, when they don't obscure it, are part of a larger pattern and purpose of a God whose love raises as many questions as it answers. Which is why Julian of Norwich, that wisest of theologians of the love of God, chose to speak with a simple image about mysteries beyond our ken:
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.
And into the eternal care and creative purposes of such love, we have entrusted our daughter Aileen, and ourselves. Sombre colours, and a thread of gold. The tapestry of our lives.
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