Paul
declares in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 that we are made new through Christ. We have
been reconciled before God and sparked into a new creation. And so, his
reasoning goes, with that new life intact we are the ones to bring God’s
reconciliation to others, “God making his appeal through us…” Do you see that
all things are new like this? It’s really a pretty elusive task. Sometimes I
just don’t have the right frame of mind.
Our
imaginations need to be stocked with such a vision. Poets know how to do this.
One was Gerard Manley Hopkins who declares in the poem, God’s Grandeur, that
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and that even though we do a
pretty good job of messing creation up, “… for all this, nature is never spent;
/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; / And though the last
lights off the black West went / Oh morning, at the brown brink eastward,
springs--/ Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast
and with ah! bright wings.”
Another
is Langston Hughes who wrote in I Dream a World that he did, in fact, dream a
world “Where love will bless the earth / And peace its paths adorn...” and
“…joy, like a pearl, Attends the needs of all mankind.”
And
Antonio Machado wrote in the poem Last Night, as I was Sleeping “…that I had a
beehive / here inside my heart. / And the golden bees / were making white combs
/ and sweet honey / from my old failures.”
So with
their help and with Paul’s vision of a new creation we are asked to re-think
what is handed to us from day to day. We are asked to see grandeur in tear
soaked faces, and the joy of first light. We are asked see the seeds of peace
in our last social rift, and just how it is that God re-works—reconciles—our
old failures. Do you see it? It’s…. it’s… just… there, it flames “out, like
shining from shook foil…”
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