Monday 10 September 2007

The Deepest View

'It's the hardest kind of need, that never knows a reason,
are we such a lonely breed, or just born in a lonely season,
Baby, it's all in the eyes, it's where the reckoning begins,
it's where we linger like a sigh, it's where we long to be pulled in,
it's where we learn to say goodbye, without saying anything,
just standing on the borderline, outside looking in".

Mary Chapin-Carpenter.


Stormy weather - one of those dry, unbearable nights where you just can't sleep because you can't get comfortable, and where it's just too still to allow your thoughts to rest...
That's what, I think, we often find in the soul of people, 'behind the eyes'.

Why, I wonder, are we often so lonely, so empty, even if we have so much?
What is it in us that yearns for a world where beauty is not just something we can admire, but
enshrine and 'breathe' into a realm free of frustration and futility? What wish or dream would be hallowed if all the best and good aspects of life were emancipated from the tarnish of corruption and brevity?

The shock of our existence is when we look that deep, we sense amidst the dark and the still that there is an answer, as sharp and breathtakingly close as our own reflection.

What am I, asked the singer, that I am both so small and so profound?
The answer lies where this writer, probably with bated breath, goes on to point...
A morning where a communion of persons stood upon the new earth and decreed:

"Let us make them like us" - to reflect our image.

Creation is imbued with a need, a longing, that matches our own perplexity, the futility of being caught between what we were made to be and what we shall be - the solution to the cycle of futility and death, and the day will come when that reality breaks upon the world like a summer day after the bleakest of winters.

Dare we look there? Dare we allow such a reckoning of ourselves, as we yield to that longing, to see both the true image, and grant the 'tug' to the God who is there to take us home?

The voice that has followed us all our days is still calling, if we can but hear.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hello, howard.
my first visit. this post is very well written ans puts the the thouht across very graciously.