Coracle Trust E-Reflections

All our seeing rinsed and cleansed

Tuesday 7 September 2010

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed.

Edwin Muir, The Transfiguration

Praise the LORD, O my soul;…
Who satisfies your desires with good things
So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s (Psalm 103:1,5)

Jaded?

I admit to feeling exhausted and weary in the face of unbridled enthusiasm and optimism.  There it’s out. I’m also appalled, though sometimes amused, by the ‘Grumpy old sods…’ TV series.  The yardstick for evaluating where you’re at – passion – can seem like an endless me-centred treadmill.  And the prospect of cynicism and a shriveled view of life, whilst a helpful visual warning, is no godly target. 

The dearest freshness

So, what might this psalmist be getting at?  It’s been perplexing me for a while.  I think it’s about freshness or vitality, as might be suggested by an underground stream.  God so ancient, so new.  Hopkins wrote that ‘there lives the dearest freshness deep down things’.  Here we have something that grows up or emerges from the depths below, a vitality that pushes through to the surface.  We carry our childhood, youth and early adult years with us.  And it is this youthful hope which ‘springs eternal’ that will lead us into what we may yet become.  Young adulthood is archetypal as well as actual.  It’s vigour is to be recovered, transferred into later years so that we are renewed like the eagle’s. Graceful ease and a muscular joy are real prospects it seems.  And a new way of seeing and handling the holy?