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As we go into a sermon series about our common ground (by Gregg! Hooray!), common ground with each other as believers and with God as humans, these words below speak deeply to me. I was an English major at Mary Washington (I specialized in poetry) and I find that the Spirit often reveals things about his character to me through poems, and even more often, through poems about the natural world. Here is one of my favorite poems, from a sonnet cycle by Seamus Heaney, entitled “Glanmore Sonnets.” This is sonnet one:
I.
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then…Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.
I think that in order for God to work in our lives, he often has to plow our hearts and the hard earth of our lives before anything can grow. On line eight, Heaney writes “My lea is deeply tilled,” and I think what makes that amazing is in the definition of a “lea:” it’s a field where either hay or nothing has grown for a few years, which is then plowed so that it can be used for planting.
We can often take our cues from the natural world, I think; God gives us parallels for our own lives if we examine creation. John 15 talks about how God “prunes” us; when we are “in the dust of death” (Ps 22) he breaks up our soil, and our “roots grow down into him” so that our faith grows and we overflow, unable to contain our thanks (Col 2).
I know it’s still winter (and we will be lucky if we have “the mildest February for twenty years”), but I remember this every spring: however we have let our hearts grow cold or harden, God breaks up our winter shell deliberately so that we can be not “a dark unblown rose,” but flowers in full bloom.
Julia
