One of my favourite poets is Elizabeth Jennings. Her poetry reflects and refracts the truths and questions of her Catholic faith. It wouldn’t be true to say she wrote Christian poetry – she wrote poetry, as a Christian. "Her vocation is praise, as a lover praises the things made, the makers and the Maker."
One of my favourite paintings is the Starry Night by Van Gogh – I also like Don Maclean’s rendering of the song! I’m not a stargazer, but I am fascinated, awed, and moved in my spirit by the images of the Hubble telescope. Here is one of Jennings poems, written long before those Hubble images came to us. In it "the lover praises the things made,the makers and the Maker."
Delay
The radiance of that star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eye may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
.
Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.
.
The wistfulness and the sense of our transience, the longing and the surrender of possessiveness, the mystery, the gift and the maybe of love, are all expressed in the fact that what we now see as light shone light years away and aeons ago – but we still see it. Whatever else love is – it isn’t one of life’s disposable options – it can come to us from a universe away, and so must be cherished. On which enigmatic thought I go to bed thinking of that Love that shines from eternity and arrives here, to find us.
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